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January 5-9, 2014
This Week in Events
Welcome Back & Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday with your families. It was wonderful seeing all your students` smiling faces today! I am so excited to jump in to the new semester!
A huge thank you to everyone who made the Sixth Grade Holiday Party a blast! I will be posting the pictures from the party on my website this week.
Tuesday
Wednesday - Music
Thursday - Science Vocabulary Quiz 4.1 and 4.2
Friday
Upcoming Events for your Calendar:
1/19 No School (MLK Day holiday)
Ringing in 2015 With Some Important Changes!
New Bell Schedule
The bell schedule has been changed to accommodate lower grades recess. I am sad to announce that we will not be able to utilize homeroom for consistent STE(A)M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and mathematics) projects any longer as the change in the schedule has broken up the instructional time for our homeroom blocks and we will need the time for science instruction. I am working to develop and incorporate more STEAM-like activities into the science curriculum.Homeroom Swap
Also, students will be swapping homeroom every Thursday to work with Mrs. Fungo and ensure that we have equal time we each group of students.
Library
The sixth grade team decided to swap our biweekly, set library time, for a more flexible time used in support of content area research projects. Sixth grade students have permission to check out book during their lunch and recess.
Science
Due to the shortened week for homework, we will be reviewing vocabulary in class on Wednesday to prepare for the Quiz on Thursday.
By the end of the week, students will be researching and begin writing about the Soccket Ball and the thermo-electric flashlight in a five paragraph, research-based, essay. This will be due, along with the labs completed in class, on February 12.
Math
New Books
Expect a new Common Core aligned workbook to come home with students by the end of the week. They will need to bring this back and forth to school with them. Just to clarify, if they have been carrying either a math textbook or a science textbook back and forth, they do not need too.
Fluency
In an effort to help students compute multi-step word problems without basic computational errors, and to free up their attention spans to focus big ideas and making connections, we have begun to start our days with fluency warm-ups. These include 'Sprints' and 'Rapid White Board Exchanges.' Both activities focus on students ability to quickly, and without much thought, compute basic decimal, whole number and fraction operations.