Newsletter

Social Studies
Today kicks off our three week unit on our final ancient civilization: Greece! Unfortunately, due to the timing of FCAT, we will not be having a celebration at the conclusion of this unit. We will need to use that time to finish our math review. This week we will be focusing on the location of this ancient civilization in the Mediterranean Sea and how living on the sea helped them with trading. There will be a quiz on Friday.

Science
We have finished our introduction to the five basic forms of energy: light, heat, sound, electrical, and mechanical. Hopefully you have visited the blog to learn about the energy posters we have been working on at school. Students will need to know about all five forms, although their poster is only on one. In order to help students organize information about all five forms, they have been given a chart to organize their notes. We will glue it into our notebooks on Tuesday, so they can use it to study and review for Wednesday's quiz on the Sun's energy and the five basic energy forms. On Thursday we will dive into a concentrated series of labs on heat energy. If you have any thermometers with a Celsius scale that could be borrowed for the next two weeks, please send them in but be sure to label them with your name.

Math Workshop
We are continuing our unit about fractions called Finding Fair Shares. In this unit, students investigate the meaning of fractions and the ways fractions can be represented. Our benchmark goals are: to divide a single whole or a quanity into equal parts and name those parts as fractions or mixed numbers, identify equivalent fractions, and to find combinations of fractions that are equal to one. Ask your child about the Fraction Cookie game we will be playing later on in the week. Ask them what fraction combinations equal one whole. They will have a fractions quiz on Tuesday. Look over Unit 7 in their workbook (pages 1-17) and their fraction pieces to review. The students will have Homework Sheet #25 assigned for the week. Also, don't forget to keep logging into Number Worlds for some awesome games to play!