Homework:

Mme Shelli’s Class:  Math Madness packets are due this week.  New homework this week is word study.  Words have “ie” and “ei” patterns.

Mme Jana’s Class:  There is no French homework this week. We will continue to work on the vocabulary about months, days and seasons in class.

Important Dates: 

Monday, January 21 –  Martin Luther King Jr. Day – No School

Friday, February 1 –  Grading Day – No School

Monday, February 4 – Artist in residence this week and next (Making a mural.)

Mme Jana’s News  (kincaid_j@4j.lane.edu) 

FLA (French Language Arts):  We have completed most assessments. A few students who missed some days will have to make up their assessments, and we are still working to complete the speaking assessments, which occur one student at a time. We are also continuing to work on a packet about the origins of the names of the months of the year and the days of the week.

Most students finished all of their “J’observe…” writing activities, so we will likely begin a new one next week. We’ll also do another dictation, probably a repeat of the first one, and we’ll try another quiz on sentence correcting. For now, we’ll be doing Reading groups on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Our music/PE schedule will switch to Monday and Wednesday beginning the second term, so we may have to make some adjustments to what days we do reading and science.

I think it’s clear to all the parents that students may only speak French in my classroom. Most students are doing really, really well with it. I was just telling Victor yesterday how lovely it is to hear kids come into the classroom and chatter to one another in French on topics that are not academic. Of course they have more experience speaking French on academic topics, but to just find ways to say what they have in their minds when it’s about what they did over the weekend or something that happened in the breezeway, it’s very encouraging to hear.

I have been informed that our science kits will arrive on Tuesday (Yay!), so we should be able to begin science on Thursday. After that we’ll do science on Mondays and Thursdays. Again, our new unit is  Soils, Rocks and Landforms.

Mme Shelli’s News (hopper_s@4j.lane.edu)

English Language Arts:  This week we will continue reading non-fiction articles about  inventions such as telephones, radios, and television as well as an exploration of various forms of performance arts. As an extension of our science fiction reading, will also be writing a short, fictional narrative about an alien. They will work on writing organized stories with paragraphs, correct punctuation & spelling, and precise, interesting words.  

Math: We are a third of the way through our unit Understanding Fraction Equivalence and Comparison. Students will continue be finding equivalent fractions using various strategies and will be finding common denominators to compare and add/ subtract fractions this week. Here’s a sample of one of the lessons.  

Dreambox Math provides additional, leveled math practice at home and in class. There are also several other math resources for kids to try at home under the math tab on this site.