Dear Parents and Guardians,

This week we will continue to pick up with our regular curriculum. We will be doing lots of things to welcome spring and a "rebirth" into hopefully sunshiny days.

I have sent home the guidelines for Young Authors books. The books are to be turned in on March 26, 2010. Young Authors books should really be the students creation and therefore your involvement should be limited to critiquing your child's work and correcting spelling and grammatical errors. I will review types of genres with the class to help them to decide on the kind of story they will write. Creativity, neatness, and a visually attractive book is key. The children should not write a novel! The book should be written based on the student's interest. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to let me know.

This week we will have our culminating experience based on the novel we read, Scraps of Time. We will eat ice-cream sodas and have a round table discussion on the book. I have asked the children to bring in the preferred toppings. This might be sprinkles or strawberry syrup. I will provide the ice cream and whip cream. I am planning this for Friday.

Wednesday is St. Patrick's Day. Green is in!

This week we will be working on the following:

LANGUAGE ARTS:

We will be working on several activites and lessons. We will complete reading a story in our <em>OpenCourt </em>readers entitled <em>The Keeping Quilt</em>. This realistic fiction story tells the story of the memories of the Jewish narrator as she and her family experienced emigrating from Russia to America. The narrator shares how a family heirloom, a babushka, was used to celebrate important milestones in the families life as well as to preserve those memories. As a classroom community, we have celebrated our families often.  We were in awe at some of the memories shared about our families as we discussed this story. Ahmad Muhammed told us he had a great, great grandmother that he visits who happens to be only 101 years young. We want to learn more about her as well as other family members we can connect to heirlooms. We will take the test on this story as well as perform our version of scenes from <em><strong>Scraps of Time</strong>.</em>

HOMEWORK:  Homework for the next two weeks in Language Arts will be working on the Young Author's books.

WRITING:

We will be writing poems to celebrate SPRING! We will also begin to write our ideas for writing our very own mystery's based on something or an object found within our homes that can be the catalyst for a "Who done it."

MATH:

We will continue to work on Unit Seven, Multiplication and Division. We still need help learning the multiplication tables. Many of the student's know the tables when the write them in order. The key is to learn them out of order as well. Please continue to use flash cards, the computer and whatever else you can think of to support the learning of this very important skill. We must know multiplication in order to do division.

HOMEWORK:  HOME LINKS, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, Some Math Boxes 7.2-7.4 as assigned

SOCIAL STUDIES:

We will learn the Northeastern states as well as learn about the hemispheres in Map Essentials. We will also explore longitude and latitude as we figure out where certain regions are located on a map. We will take a test on the hemispheres on Friday. I will review with the students before the test.

SCIENCE:

We should be able to get back on course in Science. We will continue where we left off with earth materials.

<strong><em>HAVE A GREAT WEEK and DON'T FORGET TO SET THOSE CLOCKS FORWARD!</em></strong>