Week of May 5

Happy Monday!

I hope that everyone enjoyed the beautiful weather this past weekend. Hopefully we have seen the end of the cold :)

Reading: There is no reading street story this week due to ISTEP Monday and Tuesday. We will finish our class novel, Shiloh, this week. The kids really seem to be enjoying this book! Our main focus with the novel this week will be on analyzing the characters and identifying the theme. Students have done a wonderful job with this book, and they really seem to be enjoying it.  We will continue stations this week. In guided reading, we will focus on making inferences with informational texts. In stations, students will practice identifying the author's purpose, summarizing and identifying nonfiction text features, word choice (ordering and justifying words within their context), and practice with fluency. In guided reading, students will read "cliff hangers" and predict the end of the story using text based evidence.

Math: We will continue Unit 7 this week in Math. As ISTEP concludes tomorrow, students will be receiving math homework throughout the rest of the week. It is important that students are able to practice the order of operations as much as possible. We have practiced using parentheses and exponents during the last few lesson. We will also begin incorporating negative numbers by the end of this week.


Writing: This week we will continue our compare/contrast writing unit. Today, the students were introduced to a new format we will begin to use when planning our writing. I really think students will enjoy this new strategy. It should help students plan their writing more efficiently and effectively. We worked on the four square strategy as a class today. Students will have practice developing their own compare and contrast "four square" throughout the week over a topic of their choice.

Other Notes:

**ISTEP will be ending Tuesday, May 6th (tomorrow). I am VERY proud of the students for their efforts they have shown over the past week!

**This Friday students will be attending Career Day from 1:00-3:00. This should be an amazing event, and a great way for students to learn about all kinds of jobs they may want to pursue! Students will receive their agenda on Friday so that they know what their classroom rotations are.

Thanks!

Miss Hetzner