Newsletter Info

Social Studies
The focus of this week's discussion is making choices with our money. We will learn a little bit more about how businesses work to compete with one another, as well as how they generate their prices. Students will be introduced to the concepts of "opportunity cost" and "scarcity." We will also learn how businesses use ads to appeal to our emotions and generate sales. The quiz will be Friday.


Science
We begin our new unit on Matter this week. This unit will include an examinations of the following essential questions: How can we describe solids and liquids? and How can we measure solids and liquids? We will learn how to compare objects by properties such as size, shape, color, texture, and hardness. We will learn the difference between mass and volume, as we are introduced to new tools like the balance and the graduated cylinder. Please help us use correct terminology when you discuss mass and weight at home. Remember, that mass is the amount of matter in an object and weight is the measure of the pull of gravity on the amount of matter/mass in an object.

In Math Workshop, the students are understanding the inverse relationship between multiplication and division and using their knowledge to solve problems. For example, a robot has 4 hands. Each hand has 6 fingers. How many fingers does the robot have altogether? The students should recognize this is as a multiplication situation and use the equation 4x6 (4 groups of 6). They might then use skip-counting (6, 12, 18, and 24) to determine that the robots have 24 fingers. A similiar division story problem the students have worked with is as follows: Frogs usually have 4 legs. If there are 16 legs in the pond, how many frogs are there? The students should write the equation 16/4= and skip count by 4's to determine that there are 4 frogs in the pond. We will continue working with multiplication and division combinations throughout the week. Our unit will end next week and our end of unit assessment is scheduled for Wednesday, December 15th. Old homework sheets are a fantastic resource to review in preparation for the test. The homework sheet for this week is Sheet #15 and will be checked on Wednesday and Friday.