Looking Toward the Busy Road Ahead

How good it was to see four of our own 5-1 parents (okay, three and one older sister--way cool) at Camp Tecumseh for the training the other day. It's going to be a great trip--although we will all admit that we're hoping for slightly warmer weather.

The week ahead is going to be a full and busy one:

1. We'll be learning all about astronomy, in particular why we have the seasons, the moon phases, and how the sun, moon, and Earth interact. Our lessons about ancient astronomers will even tie in with our lessons in Social Studies on the early explorers (who were legion, by the way).
   
2. Commas! We are now on the part of the comma process where we're talking about clauses (both dependent and independent), conjunctions, and then splicing sentences together to form more concise wordings. We're also going to be doing some worksheets this week which entail all of the comma rules. But no fear, I will put the page numbers from the WriteSource 2000 books that have these rules. These are to prepare them for a quiz-test ("quest") next Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm proud to say that grammar is coming along nicely, as evidenced in their DOLs and the other sheets and assessments we've done in class.
   
3. Today the kids are even creating their own super-heroes complete with origin stories. These will go on the bulletin board outside the classroom--which has been the same since the start of the school year. Yikes, well, at least it's being changed now.
   
4. Later on in this week, I hope to introduce the class to the four types of sentences: declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory. This shouldn't take too long to cover.
5. The big states and capitals test is this Friday! Review these with your child each night and it will help them a lot. This is the perfect thing to review while driving, while they're eating breakfast, during commercials...
   
6. Math! In Math this week, we will be continuing with our hodgepodge of a unit, but mostly focusing on using a protractor, the angles of a triangle, using a compass, etc. Look for a unit test to occur next week, approximately midweek. This one should be fairly easy if the kids can get the concepts down. Most kids like this stuff better than plug-and-chug arithmetic type problems.
   

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! Look for updates throughout the week.