April 2, 2010

        Salutations Families and Friends! Here is the latest scoop about our week at school.

                                                      Literacy

      This week’s Open Court story was called The Hole in the Dike, retold by Norma Green. This story is a folktale that takes place in Holland. A young boy named Peter saves his town from flooding by plugging up a hole in the dike. The dike had been built to protect the town from rising sea water.

      Our grammar lessons focused on homophones. Homophones are also called homonyms and they are words that sound the same, but have different spellings and meanings. Examples are they’re, their, and there.

                                                       Math

    We completed our geometry unit this week. The last lessons of this unit focused on finding the area of polygons. We measured area in square inches and square centimeters. We also explored strategies for comparing possible paths and shortest paths between two points on grid paper.

                                                        Theme

      The students have been enjoying experiments using magnets. We learned about the poles of a magnet, we looked at the magnetic field of magnets using iron filings, and we learned that poles of a magnet can attract or repel. We discovered that if the poles of two magnets come together and are the same (north, north or south, south), the magnets repel, or push away from each other. If the poles are opposite (south, north), the magnets attract.

                                                    Other News

          Happy Birthday to Wyatt who turned 8 years old last week!

                    Here is our Friday riddle: Why are fish so smart?

                                       Have a wonderful weekend!