Biographies, Liquid Volume, and Bridges

February 3, 2017

Dear Parents and Guardians,

I hope that you have been having a good week. Thank you all so much for your contributions to the student leadership team’s Souper Bowl of Caring.

Reading

At the public library this week, students chose biographies of famous people. We also have biographies in the classroom. I am encouraging students to choose at least one biography of a famous African American to honor Black History month. As students read their biographies, they are pausing to think about what they have learned about the person and questions that they still have about him or her. Find out who your student is learning about!

Writing

We are continuing to work on writing fiction. This week we focused on developing characters in our stories. We looked at how authors of fiction use descriptions, actions, and dialogue to help the reader understand the characters. Have a conversation with your child about their characters and help them brainstorm what their characters might look like, say, or do to make them more realistic and interesting.

Math

This week we focused on measuring liquid volume with metric and customary units. I tried to help the students understand the relative sizes of cups, pints, quarts, gallons, liters, and milliliters. Take the opportunity at home to look at labels to check the liquid volumes of different household items. Today we revisited elapsed time and next week we will look at data and graphing.

Science

Students worked hard to build bridges out of paper this week. They put together great ideas from different bridges that we learned about, such as truss bridges, suspension bridges, and arch bridges to build surprisingly strong paper constructions! Here is a picture of a bridge that could hold more than 200 pennies!

Try building a new bridge at home!

Book Orders

This round of book orders are due on Friday, February 17.

Yours truly,

Jessica Harwood