Our week in learning 5/7

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The antepenultimate week of the 2017-2018 school year has arrived! This week,
students will continue to work on their literature projects; we will finish reading
Across Five Aprils; and students will prepare for their final science and grammar
exams of the year. Math groups will resume at 8:00 this Wednesday.

Clubs: The final day of clubs is Friday, May 11 (exception: K-1 Art).

Students will be completing their study of angles in math this week by studying the
 properties of quadrilaterals, as well as getting in some protractor practice by 
teaching each other how to draw quadrilaterals. To help review for the Friday test,
 students will be reviewing Thursday in class as well as creating a geometry toolkit 
 with all of our important concepts from this unit.  

This week in language arts, students will be reviewing their grammar notes from

 throughout the year in preparation for their end-of-year grammar test. In addition

 to reviewing their classification and diagramming skills, they will review parts of 

speech, predicate adjectives and nominatives, direct and indirect objects, pronouns 

and antecedents, rules for making a word possessive, and using colons and 

semicolons. On Wednesday, students should take home a practice test that will 

serve as a study guide for the test next Tuesday, May 15th.

In Across Five Aprils, students will finish the book and begin their final literature

 project: creating a newspaper page which contains:

• A title
• A summary of a Civil War battle or event (2 paragraph minimum)
• An opinion article (see handout for prompt; must include 2 quotations; 
  2-3 paragraph minimum)
• A Civil War era photograph to accompany the summary
• An advertisement of a Civil War era product

The project will be due on May 16th. Students will be given some time in class

 throughout the week, but this project should be largely completed at home. 

This week in science, students will finish learning about the nervous system by

 learning about the lobes of the brain and their functions. The study guide is due 

on Friday, and a review game will take place in class on Thursday. This will allow 

students to correct and clarify questions on their study guides before they are due. 

The nervous system unit test will be on Monday, May 14.

Students are beginning their exciting unit on Native Americans: Cultures and 

Conflicts. Students were separated into groups on Friday to read chapters about 

specific regions of Native Americans. In these groups, students will prepare a short

 15-minute lesson with notes about their chapter. Presentations will take place on 

Wednesday. We will also learn about relations between Indians and European settlers 

before the American Revolution, revisit the Louisiana Purchase, and the Trail of Tears. 

Students will also learn about the effects of European diseases on the Indian population, 

and the Sand Creek Massacre. Students already have their study guides for this 

short unit. The study guides are due Wednesday, 5/16 and the test will be on 

Thursday, 5/17.