Room 16 Update: April 2-6

Good afternoon,

Just a few important reminders about this week coming up:

STATE REPORT DUE ON TUESDAY

Your child's State Report is due on Tuesday. I will be collecting the following items:

• typed or neatly written final draft, which should include a title page, bibliography, and state symbols coloring page
• Presentation Board
• 3-D project

We will share the State Reports in class on Tuesday and Wednesday and the projects will be on display in the classroom Wednesday night during Open House for all to see and enjoy.

FIELD TRIP: "Into the Woods" @ Chabot Elementary School on Wed

This Wednesday, April 4, we will attend a musical theater production of Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" as performed by the boys and girls at Chabot Elementary School. We have parent chaperones that will need to meet at Room 16 at 9:30am. We will depart by 9:40am and the performance begins at 10am. Most likely, it will run 90 minutes and we will be back on campus at Proctor before our noon dismissal.

Thank you to all parents and especially the last two parent volunteers who stepped up on Friday.

OPEN HOUSE & ART SHOW - WED NIGHT

This Wednesday, April 4, is a big day for Proctor Elementary School. The annual Art Show and Open House will take place between 7pm and 8pm. Please visit the classroom to enjoy a closer look at all that we've been doing!

1:50pm DISMISSAL

Due to Parent Conferences, school will be dismissed at 1:50pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday this week with our regular 12pm dismissal time on Wednesday.

PARENT CONFERENCE

If you would like to visit to discuss your child's progress, I will be available between 2pm and 3pm every day this week. I can meet at later times (between 4pm-5pm) on Tuesday and Thursday. Due to Open House, I will not be available this Wednesday. Please e-mail me and we can arrange a time that works for both of us.

CHABOT SPACE & SCIENCE CENTER - Thursday, April 19

We need drivers to take 10 students on Thursday, April 19, for our upcoming field trip to the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, CA. Please let me know if you are available and willing to help out on that day. We will leave campus by 9:15am and return to campus by 2:50pm.

MATH

We are now in Chapter 23 (Analyze Data) with one chapter to go in the textbook. Students particularly struggled on our Chapter 21 (Area) test. This week we will review area (triangle, parallelogram, rectangle, square) and re-do that exam. I really want to make sure we have sufficient time to prepare for spring testing, however, there are just a few spots with "area" that the class obviously did not master prior to the exam. So we need to revisit a couple of lessons and put in some more practice this week before we can move on. Meanwhile, we're going to continue studying graphs and data analysis in our current chapter this week. We'll also be assessing surface area and volume this week in Chapter 22. That was just a two-lesson chapter.

LANGUAGE ARTS

We will be reviewing Theme 5 this week in light of the fact that we are going to complete a Theme Skills Test on Friday covering every grammar, vocabulary, spelling, reading comprehension, and writing skill covered over the past five weeks. Kind of a big deal. Those skills we will thoroughly review this week include:

• READING COMPREHENSION: Author's Purpose and Perspective; Literary Devices
• WRITING FORM: Persuasive Composition
• WRITING TRAITS: Sentence Fluency; Organization
• GRAMMAR: Action and Linking Verbs; Present Tense Verbs; Subject-Verb Agreement; Past and Future Tenses; Perfect Tenses
• SPELLING: Words with Word Parts in-, out-, down-, up-; Words with Word Parts -ation, -ition; -sion, -ion; Words with Silent Letters; Words with Unusual Plurals

Students will also complete an Oral Reading Fluency test. Minimum grade-level standards for words correct per minute is 139.

SCIENCE

Students are studying Chapter 4 on Body Systems: circulatory, respiratory, urinary, and digestive. We completed an art project related to the parts of these systems in class and for homework this past week.

Your child recently completed the Chapter 3 test on cells and cell parts. You can review their progress and score on that exam when it goes home tomorrow. 

SOCIAL STUDIES

It was our pleasure to enjoy the Walk Through the American Revolution this past Tuesday in the Arts Center via California Weekly Explorer, Inc. 

We will be studying our state capitals this week with a special packet of all 50 states and capitals. I will have weekly quizzes through April and a culminating 50-state quiz at the end of next month.

OK, that's all for now!

Regards,

Mr. McMurray