Atkinson Gazette
Room 203's Weekly Newsletter
What's UP in Room 203?
WAHOO! Testing is officially over! We had quite the relaxing week last week - your kids deserved it! This week we will be off learning new things and finishing up our frog parachute STEM project.
I will be out on Wednesday for District Literacy Academy. If you have any carpool changes, please e-mail Paula or Priscilla in the office.
Super Student: N/A
Pawsitive Panther for March - Self Control/Patience: Alex
Academic News
Math
For the remainder of the year, students will be learning skills to help them for end of year MAPS testing as well as learning skills that will be helpful for them upon entering 4th grade.
This week we will learn about Coordinate Graphs. I will start by introducing what a coordinate grid is and we will practice through games whole group and with partners. When introducing the grid, I will show them all four quadrants so they are aware, but our practice will consist in quadrant 1.
We will also take our frog parachute data and teach students how to compute the average (mean) of their three drops. After that, we will do a mini-lesson to introduce mean, median, and mode. We then plan to have students graph their data as a team, then we will compile all of the groups data and create a class-wide graph of our data.
Keep in mind, students will continue to have daily math homework to reinforce skills learned in class as well as Daily 6 Review on Thursday nights. Also, please please please continue to work multiplication facts at home.
Language Arts
This week we will be focusing on writing. Students began a colAR perspective writing story a couple of weeks ago. I noticed as we shared our stories that our students are lacking good leads on how we can hook our reader (i.e. Hi, my name is...). My plan for tomorrow is to teach students how to create good leads using dialogue, description of the setting, using your senses, and onomatopoeia's. Students will then look at their stories and pick out the beginning of their draft and see how they can improve it using one of the strategies we talked about. They may have some lead homework coming home this week.
NEW: We will be adding in cursive time during our daily schedule until the end of the school year!
Spelling
Spelling just didn't fit in our agenda last week (tired kids!!), so we will pick back up Tuesday and Thursday and have the test on Friday. Students will be going on a word hunt during read-to-self to find words that follow our pattern and on Thursday students will be brainstorming a list of words on a Google Doc then creating sentences or a story using 5 of the the words and 5 of the non-negotiable words.
Spelling Rule #4:
"Doubling consonants in the middle of words" ex. puzzle, rabbit
Just a reminder, that each spelling pattern gets added to Spelling City and students can practice them on there at any time. If you would like your child's log-in, please let me know.
Please remind your child that these words are not just to be memorized for the test on Friday's then forgotten. They need to be transferred and used in every subject, and most importantly WRITING!
Science/Social Studies
STEM: Students were given time last week to redesign and create their frog parachute in order to make it last longer in the air. Almost all of our teams were successful in making their parachute last longer and not shorter. On Friday, we did our last drop! This week we will compute the average scores and the winner across the three drops.
As we close this STEM activity, we will begin another! To bring in the family into the fun, for the month of May, I will be sending home an "At-Home STEM" activity. Students will be given the most of the month of May to complete it and it will come back on May 22nd. Join in on the FUN! Your kids love it :)
Below is the video I e-mailed out on Friday. As we finish up with graphing and math, I will add more and resend the finished video.
Genius Hour
We will be back on track for Genius Hour this week. We've had a busy couple of weeks and I know I have eager students ready to present and others ready to research more.
*If you student is ready to start creating, make sure they bring their materials to class Friday so they are not wasting an hour. Many are choosing to do digital components, which is great, but some are needing poster board and other things.
Important Dates
Author Visit
Wednesday, Apr 29, 2015, 08:15 AM
University Park Elementary School, Amherst Avenue, Dallas, TX, United States
UP Carnival
Friday, May 1, 2015, 04:30 PM
University Park Elementary School, Amherst Avenue, Dallas, TX, United States
UP Field Day
Friday, May 22, 2015, 08:00 AM
University Park Elementary School, Amherst Avenue, Dallas, TX, United States
Last Day of School (Early Release!)
Friday, May 29, 2015, 02:00 PM
University Park Elementary School, Amherst Avenue, Dallas, TX, United States
About Miss Atkinson
Email: atkinse@hpisd.org
Website: http://up.hpisd.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=419982&type=u
Location: 3505 Amherst Avenue, Dallas, TX, United States
Phone: (214) 780-3400