Students read Dancing Rainbows by Evelyn Clarke Mott in their anthologies this week.  They focused on identifying the topic, main idea, and details of the selection.  The topic tells what the entire selection is mainly about, the main idea are the most important ideas about the topic, and the details are smaller bits of information that support or tell more about the main idea.  Our new vocabulary words were ancestors, elders, honor, imitating, and respect.  Next week will be a review/test week!  Students will read two short stories to assist them in reviewing the skills they learned in the Celebrating Traditions theme.  One will be about a woman whose goal is to make the world more beautiful and the other is a non-fiction piece about celebrating Chinese New Year.  We will be taking theme tests at the end of next week.

In spelling we focused on spelling with the long ‘i’ sound.  In grammar we worked on plural forms for words ending in ch, sh, x, and s, students needed to add an –es to these words.  We also reviewed words ending in y.  Ask your student about what the consonant and vowel house gave the y when it asked to become plural.  Next week we will have a review spelling list.

Students completed their chapter three tests and are moving on to higher multiplication in chapter five.  (We will cover chapter four later.)  In chapter five students will be multiplying two, three, and four digit numbers by one digit numbers.  They started out by multiplying numbers by multiples of ten (ex. 2,000x 4=_______).  We also worked on estimating products on Friday.  Please continue to practice the multiplication facts at home.

Students continued their exploration of the Solar System this week, focusing on the gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.  Did you know that Jupiter’s day lasts 11 hours?  Though it moves slowly around the sun, it spins very quickly.  Students were interested to learn that the four gas giants have rings, Jupiter has at least 63 moons, and Saturn has at least 60!  Ask your student which about another fact they learned.