Important Dates

• April 19th - Field Trip to Langston Hughes Middle School
• April 29th - Gettysburg Field Trip

Language Arts

What are we learning?

• Students are learning as readers how to actively prepare for test questions using everything they know about tests and the genre.

Home/School Connection

• Have your student share the different strategies they are using to help with reading comprehension.

Math

What are we learning?

• Students are learning to make connections between and among multiple representations of the same proportional relationship using verbal descriptions, ratio tables, and graphs.

Home/School Connection

• Have your student help you determine unit rates when grocery shopping. 
• Ask your student to help you figure out how many miles your car gets to the gallon on average.

Social Studies

What are we learning?

• Students are learning about how the struggles over the future of slavery’s expansion agitated the United States for decades and led the nation into the Civil War.

Home/School Connection

• Ask your student to describe how slave labor and the cotton trade gave way for  huge economic gains for some people (not enslaved African Americans)  in the south, north, as well as globally in the 19th century.

AAP

Math:

• In our Data Distributions Unit, students will continue to build on the concept of ratios and rational numbers to solve problems including problems that require proportional reasoning. How does the content emphasis come to life in this unit? Analyzing the way a set of data is presented in a histogram and, in contrast, how that data is presented in a different format is a crucial component of understanding why mathematicians use different types of graphs. In this unit, students will compare data presented in various formats and think critically about the implications of data being presented in different ways. An essential part of this analysis is comparing other features of the data as visual and numeric ratios. 
• Our next unit will focus on Surface Area & Volume.

Language Arts:

• In this unit, students take on the role of reader, writer, and researcher. Janet Angelillo states,  “It is powerful for children to realize that they don’t have to accept everything that is written on a page, that they have a responsibility as thinkers to question and make meaning from their reading.”
• Students will learn when and how a topic becomes an issue. An issue is an idea or notion upon which you can take a stand. While "types of waste disposal" is a topic, "deciding whether or not to provide funding for recycling and other economic disposal waste programs" is an issue, or a point of discussion, debate, or dispute. Researching an issue may require some fact finding, but only as a means to better understand the issue. We will end our unit with students writing an article on an issue of choice.

Social Studies:

• Our current unit explores how change in America was forced during Westward Expansion. We dive into the years between 1801 and 1861 and learn how the newly formed United States changed in many ways- size, shape, technological innovations, and more.
• In our next unit, students will dive into the Civil War to correspond with our learning from the field trip to Gettysburg.

Table Talk:

• How does my learning community change over time?
• How does my learning about the changes in the past help me understand the present?
• How do organisms, including humans, change the environment they live in?
• How do personal experiences, relationships, and beliefs inspire people to make changes in their community?
• What causes positive, neutral and negative changes in society?
• How does the idea of change connect with the concepts I am learning in class?

Click here to see what students are learning in Specials!