MRS. KING'S SCHOLARS

The char­ac­ter trait being fea­tured in November-​​December is trustworthiness.

Par­ents, please help your chil­dren to remem­ber to bring their parent-​​initialed Clean Slate Chart to class I check it first thing every Mon­day 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: Last week we fin­ished Unit 2 and took the test. Results were very good over­all. Keep up the good work. This week we worked on mini unit B which focuses on sym­me­try, and con­gru­ence, as well as under­stand­ing and mea­sur­ing angles and tri­an­gles. There are two con­cepts that are always dif­fi­cult in this unit: think­ing that diag­o­nals of rec­tan­gles are lines of sym­me­try and not draw­ing all lines of sym­me­try on non-​​quadrilateral shapes such as stars, hexa­gons and octagons. Please look for these mis­takes in the prac­tice work that comes home.

From Ms. Einspar: Unit B — nam­ing poly­gons, tri­an­gles, and angle mea­sures con­tin­ues on and tests Weds. Thurs. will be some­thing project ori­ented or pre-​​assess for unit 3.

From Mrs. Pen­ner: “I’m doing geom­e­try (mini unit) namely angles, types of tri­an­gles, symmetry.”

Grade 4:

Mrs. King’s math stu­dents: are begin­ning to work in Unit Two, Place Value and Multi-​​Digit Addi­tion and Sub­trac­tion. Unit 2 devel­ops the con­cepts of group­ing and ungroup­ing num­bers as a key step in per­form­ing multi-​​digit addi­tion and sub­trac­tion. The activ­i­ties in this unit help stu­dents gain a prac­ti­cal under­stand­ing of addi­tion and sub­trac­tion and the rela­tion­ship  between the two oper­a­tions. Stu­dents are expected to apply their under­stand­ing of addi­tion and sub­trac­tion to numeric cal­cu­la­tions and real world prob­lem solv­ing sit­u­a­tions, includ­ing those involv­ing tables of data. Esti­ma­tion and men­tal mat pro­vide stu­dents with a method to val­i­date their answers. There are 21 lessons in this unit. It is antic­i­pated that we will cover lessons 1 – 4 this week.

From Mrs. Har­vey: Unit 3, chap­ter 7 — relat­ing mul­ti­pli­ca­tion to divi­sion; alge­braic think­ing with mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion expres­sions /​ equa­tions; con­tin­u­ing our Math Quest prob­lem solv­ing project — cur­rent strat­egy is draw­ing a picture

From Ms. Medved: We are doing our geom­e­try unit.  We just fin­ished with iden­ti­fy­ing lines, and now we are doing clas­si­fy­ing Quads and polygons.

Grades 3 – 4: In Lan­guage Arts, We are cur­rently work­ing on a class book to be pub­lished as a hard­back book. Last week we word processed our pages and this week we will illus­trate our writ­ing. This is so exciting!

In Read­ing we are work­ing in read­ing groups and are using the Houghton Mif­flin read­ing antholo­gies as our texts.  Third graders will be tak­ing a unit test cov­er­ing the skills we stud­ied in the last three sto­ries. Then we will begin read­ing from a grade-​​level core lit­er­a­ture book, Indian of the Oaks.

Fourth graders have one more story to read this week before they take their unit test.

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. For this first trimester, I will be ask­ing stu­dents to work way through the 1000 most often used words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. Each week I will add one or two new lists to the queue.

Grade 3 -In Social Stud­ies we will begin Unit 2, les­son 1: How are Cal­i­for­nia Indi­ans in you region alike and dif­fer­ent. Vocab­u­lary words include: cus­tom (n.) a way of doing things; folk­lore (n.) the sto­ries and cus­toms of a group of peo­ple; tra­di­tion (n.) a spe­cial way a group of peo­ple does some­thing and that has been passed on to oth­ers; cer­e­mony (n.) an impor­tant activ­ity done for a spe­cial reason.

 Grade 4 -In Social Studies/​Science: Mrs. Calder’s and our 4^th graders are going to Ms. Medved for their sci­ence instruc­tion. I will be tak­ing her class for their Social Stud­ies instruction.

The focus of this unit of study is Elec­tric­ity and Mag­net­ism. The lessons cov­ered will include: 1) What is Sta­tic Elec­tric­ity? 2) What is an Elec­tric Cur­rent? 3) What is a Mag­net? and 4) What is an Elec­tro­mag­net?. Vocab­u­lary words include: charge, sta­tic elec­tric­ity, elec­tric field, elec­tric cur­rent, cir­cuit, elec­tric cell, con­duc­tor, insu­la­tor, resis­tor, series cir­cuit, par­al­lel circuit,magnet, mag­netic pole, mag­netic field, electromagnet.

This week we will begin to cover les­son 2, What is an Elec­tric Current?

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.