Week starting April 6, 2009

This week will be a short week and so we won't have spelling and vocabulary. In place of these assignments we will be making progress on a short story that we began last week. Your kids should have the characters, setting, conflict, and theme mapped out and planned. They should also have a 5 block storyboard that includes 10 details in each block. These details will help them as a foundation for ideas when they begin drafting. If you would like to look over these and assure they have it to be checked off on Monday it would be appreciated.

We have also been through Macbeth twice and I want to get through it one more time with the kids moving in and out of the scenes this week. As they are memorizing lines please coach them to be LOUD and SLOW. They have shown great passion and I feel it is headed to be a success if the kids can control themselves during practice time. The lines should be memorized before we go off track as we will try one walk through without scripts the week of our track change.

Your kids have 3 missing work reports that needs to be signed and turned in Monday. Looking through them I've noticed a lot of missing work. Hopefully this last leg before middle school some of the students will help to turn a corner when it comes to responsibility for schoolwork.

In math we have begun working with measurement. This is the last foundation piece before we use all the tools of 6th grade math for discovery and engineering projects. They will study ratios of measurement units (E.g. 5.3 inches to 1 of my hands) and use these ratios to calculate additional units for distance and other units related to distance. This has strong implications to the physical sciences so I will try to integrate the sciences as much as I can.

The kids also struggled with the coordinate plane assesment, especially when it came to graphing y= equations, so we will be re-addressing this with problem solving warm-ups and with our projects the last two months. I only weighted the test at 12 points so it won't impact their grade if they remain engaged in the problem solving questions throughout the week.

If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact me at your convenience.