MRS. KING'S SCHOLARS

The char­ac­ter trait being fea­tured in Jan­u­ary is cit­i­zen­ship. Wear pur­ple on Wednesdays.

Par­ents, please help your chil­dren to remem­ber to bring their parent-​​initialed Clean Slate Chart to class I check it first thing every Monday(Tuesday) morning.

MATH: We take Light­ning Rods tests on Tues­days and Thurs­days. Progress reports are sent home on those days for par­ent ini­tials. Forms need to be returned the next day in order to be updated with the cur­rent test results.  Third grade stu­dents can pre­pare for these tests by down­load­ing the drill their are cur­rently work­ing on from the Math Fact Prac­tice Pages link. Fourth grade stu­dents’ test are 80 – 100 basic fact prob­lems in addi­tion, sub­trac­tion, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion, and division.

Typ­i­cally, math home­work is assigned Tues­day –Thurs­day nights. Check your child’s plan­ner for spe­cific assignments.

Grade 3:

From Mr. Romanowski: These next two units in math focus on help­ing stu­dents mas­ter their mul­ti­pli­ca­tion facts to 10 as well as develop a strong con­cep­tual under­stand­ing of the rela­tion­ship between mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and division. Many stu­dents already have a good grasp of the facts, but that can cause prob­lems in under­stand­ing the con­cept. When they see a story prob­lem with easy num­bers, they just “know” the answer, but they don’t under­stand “why” that is the answer. As we get into sim­i­lar prob­lems with dif­fi­cult num­bers, they don’t under­stand what each num­ber rep­re­sents, # of groups, #in each group, or total #, there­fore, we are really focus­ing our dis­cus­sion in class on a deeper under­stand­ing of those parts. One way of help­ing with that at home is to have your child draw and explain a pic­to­r­ial rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the problem.

From Ms. Einspar: We are work­ing on unit 4, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion 0 – 5, 9 and 10.

From Mrs. Pen­ner: We are fin­ish­ing up mini-​​unit C.  On Wednes­day we will start mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion in the new book.

Grade 4:

Mrs. King’s math stu­dents: We will con­tinue to work in Unit 3, Mul­ti­digit Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion. Unit 3 reviews and builds upon the con­cepts of arrays, single-​​digit mul­ti­pli­ca­tion, place value, and area that the stu­dents dis­cov­ered in ear­lier units. The activ­i­ties in this unit help stu­dents gain a con­cep­tual under­stand­ing of multi-​​digit mul­ti­pli­ca­tion. They are expected to apply their under­stand­ing of multi-​​digit mul­ti­pli­ca­tion to numeric cal­cu­la­tions and real-​​world problem-​​solving sit­u­a­tions, includ­ing mul­ti­pli­ca­tion com­bi­na­tions and com­par­isons. There are six­teen lessons in this unit and it is antic­i­pated that we will cover lessons 7 – 10 this week.

From Mrs. Har­vey:

From Ms. Medved: We are work­ing on order of oper­a­tion and expres­sions (Chap­ter 7 in the CA math books)

For spelling/​word study, our class will be work­ing on the web­site:  SpellingC​ity​.com. I have pur­chased the pre­mium account for this site. I have given all stu­dents their user and and pass­word so they can log onto our class’ site. As of right now, I am con­tin­u­ing to ask­ing stu­dents to work way through the 1000 most often used words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. All lists have been added to the queue.

Grade 3 -In Social Stud­ies We are con­tin­u­ing with our book study of Indi­ans of the Oaks. We are cur­rently on Chap­ter 15, and com­plete an aver­age of two chap­ters a day. That means, we should fin­ish the book on Tues­day! We still need to spend this Fri­day fin­ish­ing up loose ends, and allow­ing for stu­dents to rewrite their own end­ing to the book. Next Mon­day will be a review, and the test will be given next Tuesday.

Grade 4 -Social Stud­ies: Mrs. Calder’s and Mrs. King’s 4^th graders have begun a new unit of instruc­tion in Social Stud­ies, Unit 2: Early peo­ple in Cal­i­for­nia. In this unit, stu­dents will learn how the arrival of the Span­ish changed the lives of the Cal­i­for­nia Indi­ans. Stu­dents will also learn how life in Cal­i­for­nia changed when Mex­ico took over the area. This unit cov­ers the explo­ration, mis­sion and ran­cho period of time. This week we will fin­ish les­son 1 and begin work­ing with les­son 2. There are 8 lessons plus a review, so it will take us a while to cover the material.

As always, there’s so much to cover and so lit­tle time! Make it a great week. AND: WHBK (work hard; be kind)

If you have any sug­ges­tions on how I can make this blog more ben­e­fi­cial to you, please email me at kking@​powayusd.​com and share your ideas with me. Thank you.