Room B23 Weekly News
August 27-31, 2018
Announcements
Hooray! We made it through the first week of 5th grade!
Thank you so much to everyone who came to Back to School Night on Thursday! It was nice to meet all of you. Also, thank you to everyone who has provided supplies for their students (and donated supplies to the classroom.) I really appreciate it.
I was delighted to receive several Parent Book Challenge forms on Friday! (Hopefully many of the rest of you will send them in this week!) I am SO excited to see the reading growth our class makes this year - and thrilled that some of you will be reading along with your child this year! How powerful for your child to see those reading habits modeled at home!
For up-to-date information about school events and upcoming dates, please remember to register for the new LCM PTO website at www.lacostameadowspto.org Also, follow LCM on Facebook through both the LCM School page (La Costa Meadows Elementary School) and the LCM Parents page (La Costa Meadows Elementary - Parents). LCM is on Instagram, too! Mr. Klimas (mr.k_lcm) and Ms. Stephens (lcm_stephens) regularly post great photos of the fun activities and amazing learning happening at our school.
Academic Updates
Math
This week in math, we will be continuing to learn about factors, focusing on greatest common factors (GCF). We will also be exploring Prime & Composite numbers, as well as Prime Factorization of numbers. These skills will help us as we move through our 5th grade math curriculum, particularly when we get to fractions and need to simplify fractions or find common denominators to add and subtract.
I am hoping that I can get my math facts fluency program up and running this week. (It's an awesome program that works through math facts in a systematic way that makes sense from the easiest (x0, x1, x5, x2) through the most difficult (x6, x7, x8). I have found it to be very effective.) If your child is not fluent on his/her facts, your child may start bringing home a page of multiplication practice from this program each evening as homework. Once your child is fluent with math facts, there will be no more of this type of homework sent home. :-) If it doesn't happen this week, bear with me! It may be next week.
Reading/Language Arts/Writing
We will be starting our first Benchmark unit this week. Unit 1 has a nonfiction focus. We will be reading a variety of texts that address the essential question, "Why do laws continue to evolve?" One of our first passages will be about the creation of the U.S. Constitution. This is a wonderful way to start the year since it ties in so beautifully with our 5th grade Social Studies standards that cover U.S. history up through the writing of the Constitution.
In writing, we will be working on writing Summary Statements, as well as beginning to work on informative paragraphs.
Science
Social Studies
Specials
Monday: P.E.
Tuesday: Music
Wednesday: none (early dismissal at 2:10)
Thursday: P.E.
Friday: none (Library will start in a couple weeks...)