Math: Today we covered a litany of new vocabulary terms and tried to apply them to a real life situation (I retold a story how I was driving in DC, couldn't make a U-turn, and had to use my knowledge of perpendicular/parallel street layouts to get me going the correct direction...). Tonight they are to complete the worksheet for homework that requires them to use this new knowledge to an actual map.

Language Arts: Tomorrow our first "at-home" project is coming home - Fall Book Report on a realistic fiction book of their choice.

Tonight's Homework from reading groups...

JGB - Reread the story and generate your Keeper Question

Miss Rumphius - Describe how Miss Rumphius changes throughout the story using text-relevant support.

The Busy Beavers - Identify the main problem in the story and explain how the problem was solved using text-relevant support.

Science: We performed a chromatography experiment today. In essence, we separated the pigments of five different black pens to see how each one's ink was created. They were pretty surprised that black ink wasn't simply black ink!

Math: Hopefully everyone had an opportunity to review your child's quiz from last Friday. In the coming weeks, you can expect to see less place value content, a refined focus on data analysis, and geometric concepts. My assessment of the class performance on the quiz is that the "understanding" of mean and median continues to be gray. I could see from the work shown that our level of understanding is more formula-like and not comprehensive...if that makes sense.

Tonight and tomorrow night I have assigned them pages 320-324, #2-43 AND the #1-6 in the problem solving section. Each student has been provided a protractor, ruler, and a compass to assist them with this content over the next few weeks.

Language Arts: Understandably our reading block has been erratic lately due to assemblies and our author study in the media center. As valuable as the events/activities of last week were, it is nice to get back to some sense of normalcy when we come back on Wednesday. With that in mind, RRJs will be coming home regularly along with your child's reading book. If they are in JGB, their RRJ is the packet for each new story (in fact, the last story's packet has feedback on it and should be in their binders if you haven't checked it out yet).