KEEPING IN TOUCH with you

Mrs. Wilson's monthly calendar: May 2008

Each week a newsletter will be sent home via the electronic mail list service or, if a hard copy is needed, in the Friday Folder. It will provide you with information on what's happened in our classroom, and keep you posted on events in the weeks to come. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to my list-server by clicking the Pathways Signup link below.

You might also be interested in "Pathways" which is Diamond Path's electronic mail list-service. By subscribing to Pathways, you will receive weekly mailings with timely news and information about our entire school. Click here to go to the Pathways Signup Page

GETTING IN TOUCH with me

You can contact me in any of the following ways:

• Electronic Mail - Shellie.Wilson@district196.org
• Front Office - call the school's main office (952-423-7695) and the front office staff will take a message for me. I will return your call as soon as I'm available.
• Voice Mail - 651-683-6969, extension 92803

AREAS of FOCUS in May

Language Arts

• Reading Workshop: The student's will be continuing with literature circle book discussions (theme: adventure and mysteries) and writing letters in their reader's notebooks. The students are continuing Book Talks. The focus for the month is on reading strategies (Inferencing, higher-level questioning, summarizing, understanding character development, and predicting).
• Writing Workshop: The students will be working on a new genre, essays. The students are developing a thesis and details to support it.
• Word Study: The students will be continuing with the weekly pattern words. The students will be learning more about prefixes and suffixes, homophones and homonyms, and using the dictionary and thesaurus.

Math

• The students will be starting a new unit on Fractions. Some skills they will be working on are comparing and ordering fractions, estimating fractional parts and understanding equivalent fractions.
• Problem Solving - The students will continue to solve problems using more than one strategy. The students will also be writing about one of their strategies. The students will be working on solving more exemplar problems and MCA style problems.
• Fact Tests - Please help your child study the weekly basic facts. It is very important that they pass each test. 90% correct or better is passing.

Health

• The students will learn about body changes and caring for their bodies during our Human Growth and Development unit. The students will learn about responsibility by taking care of a "baby egg."

Social Studies

• The students will be learning about Mexico and the Central American countries. We will end this unit with a tianguis or Central American marketplace. After studying the countries of Central America and Mexico, the students display everything they've made in a Hispanic style marketplace.

Science

• "Water is Everywhere" is the unit that the students will doing in May.