Week of April 2nd, 2016 - 17

April 4 - Book Parade Assembly
Join the ES Library Council in dressing up as characters from favorite books and parading to show the CAC reading spirit. Store bought costumes are fine, but it's quite fun to make your own. The parade will take place during our regular Tuesday assembly time on April 4. 

Guidance Update: Managing Strong Emotions

In the current guidance unit, Managing Strong Emotions, students are taught proactive strategies to help prevent strong feelings from turning into negative behaviors. Students will learn to:

1.    Recognize how strong feelings affect their brains and bodies by:

Focusing attention on their bodies for clues about how their feeling·      

Understanding that when they feel strong feelings, the feeling part of their brain, the amygdala, reacts, making it hard to think clearly.

 Recognizing that thinking about their feelings helps the thinking part of their brain, the cortex, get back in control.

 2.  Manage strong feelings by using the following Calming-Down Steps:

1.  Stop – use your signal

2.  Name your feeling

3.  Calm down (breathe, count, use positive self-talk or stress balls, etc.)

 Home-School Connection:

Ask your child about his or her personal stop signal and how he or she plans to use it in order to STOP negative thoughts and calm down emotions in the amygdala. J

READING

Having started a series, readers will learn different ways to compare books from different series. The first thing readers will compare are the main characters. Readers will consider how the characters are similar. They will ask, ‘Do they do and say similar things? Do they care about the same stuff?’ They will also ask, ‘In what ways are these characters different?’ They will then think about the problems characters face and how they react to problems. Readers can think, ‘How do these two characters react to their problems? Are their similarities? Differences?’

WRITING

This week in writing workshop, students will get to choose a new fairy tale to adapt. Of course the will be a fairy tale they know well and can recite from memory. In this part of the unit, students are transferring what they learned in their first experience of writing fairy tales to their second piece. Students will assess their own writing to set goals that will help push their writing forward. Their revision will focus on dialogue, sentence variety, and scenes that include details to show their story rather than telling it.  As fairy tales are an oral genre, you can help your student at home by asking them to story tell their new ideas for their story. 

MATH

This week we will be finishing our module 5 study of fractions on the number line. Leading up to the assessment, students will compare fractions with the same numerator using symbols (<, >, =) and use models they’ve learned throughout the unit to reason about their size. Also, our mathematicians will learn one way to create precise number lines using lined paper.  

Towards the end of the week, students will have two days to demonstrate their understanding of the fraction concepts presented throughout this unit on the end of module assessment. Prior to the assessment, mathematicians will have the opportunity to review key concepts from the unit. We encourage students to review their problem sets and homework leading up to the assessment, and to examine math walls and anchor charts in the classroom. 

Let’s work together to remind our mathematicians to read problems carefully, show their thinking in labeled diagrams and equations, and to write complete sentence answers to the specific question/s asked in the problem. 

SOCIAL STUDIES
This week we continue to compare our countries that we have researched to others. Looking at the similarities and differences that they have between cultures. Students will share with other groups the information they found and then complete a Venn diagram that is a fantastic visual representation of similarities and differences. The understanding that will de drawn from the discussion is that, all cultures are connected in some way.
Later this week we will introduce the final part of the assessment, where individual students choose one cultural aspect from their researched country to share with the class. They can choose from Important culture events, Folktales/Myths/Legends, Art/Music/Dance, and Games/leisure activities. The product they present could be;

• a demonstration and explanation of a game
• performing a dance and explaining it
• performing a song
• acting out a cultural event
• a poem
• illustrations showing a myth or folktale

They will be given time to present it to the class.