March 17-21, 2014

Lifeskill or Life-long Guideline of the week: Friendship

Math rd 3 - This week in math we are discovering perimeter and area, following our unit in geometry. Students will be exploring perimeter and area through art. We will be creating a self-portrait mosaic with square construction paper pieces to find the total perimeter and area. Students should be able to find perimeter and area of a given 2-D shape, and on grid paper. Students will understand the perimeter and area, and recall real life examples of each. *Ask your child to share about the different art activities that they are creating in class, such as their block perimeter name, animal area, and selfportrait mosaic. th th 4 - For the next two weeks 4 graders will be immersed in Geometry! In fourth grade students will review and learn new information including identifying angles as right, acute and obtuse, identifying and describing parallel, intersecting and perpendicular lines, and using attributes to describe and define two- and three-dimensional figures. Finally, students will be able to demonstrate translations, reflections and rotations and use these transformations to prove two shapes are congruent. Students will be bringing a journal back and forth to school/home each day. This journal contains vocabulary, class work and homework. Please review your childs homework with him or her each day. *The Geometry unit in fourth grade has 50 vocabulary words. Ask your child to share the movements or tricks to remember the meaning of each word. STAAR Writing Boot Camp Students are prepping for the STAAR Writing Assessment th coming up in April. Only 4 graders will be taking the assessment, but third grade will learn the basics of writing with a specific structure. This is a genre of writing that we find in many jobs in the real world and we find applicable to teach for a short time each year. This week we began drafting expository compositions. You probably have noticed that we have not had spelling words the past two weeks. For the next several weeks, our study will take a different focus. This week we are learning about appositives. Homework this week will focus on identifying appositives. On Friday, we will take a short assessment of their learning over the week. Finally, the last part of Boot Camp focuses on Revising & Editing previously written passages. Three mornings a week students are reading a short 8-10 sentence paragraph and answering revising and editing questions associated with the reading. Topics touched are transition words, spelling patterns, capitalization and comma rules, apostrophes, and the list goes on. Each day we meet to review the Revising and Editing passage. Students will begin to be assessed each Friday to monitor their progress and identify areas we need to readdress. *Ask your child to share what has been happening in STAAR Boot Camp. The Revolution of Texas This week in social studies, students will focus on the entirely of the Texas Revolution. The goal for the class is to understand the importance of the Texas Revolution, the Republic of Texas, and the annexation of Texas to the United States. Students will analyze the causes, major events, and effects of the Texas Revolution, including the Battle of the Alamo, the Texas Declaration of Independence, the Runaway Scrape, and the Battle of San Jacinto. Also, the students will be able to identify individual that contributed to the revolution, such as Texians William B. Travis, James Bowie, David Crockett, George Childress, and Sidney Sherman; important leaders such as Jose Antonio Navarro, Sam Houston, Mirabeau Lamar, and Anson Jones. Figurative Language This week, students will be reading stories and poems that introduce figurative language. We will specifically be looking into alliteration, similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, and personification. Each day, the students will be making their own poems and riddles with a device. In our classroom, the cabinet doors have become our graffiti wall of examples of each literary device. When the students find figurative language in conversations, personal readings, or in their work, students can add the example directly to our wall. Students will identify and understand the differences between the types of figurative language, and use it towards their writing. In addition, students will be familiar with the effects of the literary devices in literature. *Ask your child to share the poems and riddles that they have learned or created in class. Important Notes and Events! Keep Brentwood Beautiful Day nd When: Saturday, March 22 9am-noon Where: Meet at the blue shed at the back of the school What to Bring: clippers, branch cutters, a wheelbarrow if you have one, gardening gloves, water bottle Who: contact Amy Cox at acox1@austinisd.org with questions Report Cards will be coming home in next weeks Wednesday folder! *Please visit our wiki page for information about our class: http://mahlstadtsvrcek2-3class.wikispaces.com/ * Please check the calendar online every week as dates do change. http://mahlstadtsvrcek2-3class.wikispaces.com/Calendar