August 20-24

Welcome back to the second full week of the new school year! Thanks for checking back in with us!

Notes for the week...

** While we understand that sometimes travel schedules may conflict with school due to circumstances beyond your control, we ask that families take our school calendar in consideration when making travel plans.  Because so much of our learning at Discovery School is experiential, hands-on, and project-centered, it is often difficult for students to make up what they have missed when they are away from class.  In addition, because we do a lot of work in collaborative partners, groups, and teams, any student who misses school may be affecting other students that depend on his/her collaboration.  If you are not able to avoid your child missing class, we ask that you notify Mr. Andrew or Ms. Amy as far in advance as possible so that we may do our best to make any necessary arrangements.  Thank you for your consideration!

** Want to know what the Wolves Café has to offer? Check out their blog at  https://wolvescafeteria.wordpress.com/ to see the menu for each day!

** If students are unable to complete homework due to internet connectivity problems or technical issues, we ask parents to please send the homeroom teacher a text, email, or note to verify this.  Thank you!

** In order to help you keep updated with special classes, we have posted the links to the blogs for Spanish, Spanish Social Studies, Music, French, and PE in the right-hand sidebar under "My Blog List."  These blogs are updated every week, just like our class blog, so be sure to check in regularly to stay up-to-date on these classes!

This week in class...

Language Arts

This week in Guided Reading, we will continue reading the novel Bridge to Terabithia while exploring themes, figurative language, and characterizations. We will practice our summarizing skills along with how to have productive class discussions using our Accountable Talk sentence stems.  Students will continue reading and conferring about books they have chosen for themselves as well in Self-Selected Reading.

In Writing, we will be working on our descriptive writing pieces, to practice "exploding" our writing with details as well as using the writing process to revise and edit our writing. We will also practice our new Word Wall Words for the week:  right, brake, ate, however, while, believe. A few times a week we revisit these words to practice not only spelling and using the words themselves, but also extending patterns to help with other words as well.

Math

This week we will continue working with place value in whole numbers and decimals.  Students will be writing, modeling, and explaining the concepts we are practicing.  We will also be comparing whole numbers and decimals based on place value.  There will be a quiz on Friday.

This week students will begin to use Xtramath.org at home every afternoon to build speed and accuracy with basic multiplication and division facts.  Each lesson only takes 5-10 minutes, but this has proven to be very helpful for students in the past, as long as they practice regularly. It is particularly important to strengthen these skills this year before we advance into more complicated multiplication and division concepts.

Homework:

Monday: One Xtramath.org lesson, Math IXL G.3
Tuesday: One Xtramath.org lesson, Math IXL G.4

Wednesday: One Xtramath.org lesson
Thursday: One Xtramath.org lesson, Math IXL A.3

Social Studies

In Social Studies, we'll be finishing up our review of the concept of government with activities exploring the 3 branches of the U.S. government and the concepts of "checks and balances, along with comparisons between the U.S. and Honduran governments. We'll have a quiz on Thursday over the concepts we've covered in the last couple weeks.

Thank you for all of your support, parents! Please feel free to email us if you have any

questions.

Ms. Amy and Mr. Andrew