Marvelous Monday

We had a marvelous Monday!  The kiddos were so focused & worked extremely hard! :)  Just a few things that I wanted to pass along to you are below.

Homework
Homework is starting back up in 2017!  This morning we went over homework  Students are still expected to read for at least 15 minutes, complete a math game night & a fact practice night.  Last week we had no students that passed their Math Wizard Test - please continue to practice with your child on these facts at home.  If you would like extra tests to practice on please let me know.  One night of homework is to answer 3 word problems - we have been working on stacking the numbers & making sure to include a qualifier (what the problem is asking about).  The other night of math homework is a geometry section.  There are two questions that the students are answering.  We have been reviewing these questions during our geometry unit, but I wanted to make sure that as parents you knew the answers in case your child is struggling.

• A rectangle is a quadrilateral with opposite sides that are the same length.  A square is a quadrilateral that all sides are the same length.  So all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.
• A parallelogram has 2 sets of parallel lines (2 lines that will never cross/intersect).  A trapezoid only has 1 set of parallel lines.

Math
Today, we took the STAR Math Assessment (this is a computerized math assessment).  The students took this same assessment in August.  I will have these scores to be sharing with you at conferences.  Tomorrow, we will be starting our addition unit with regrouping (carrying).  This will be the first unit that we will take a pre- and a post-test in.  As your child continues to advance in school, pre- & post-tests will be occurring more and more often.

Reading

• Nonfiction Reading: We are working on reading nonfiction texts with the purpose of answering questions.  We talked about the importance of reading through the questions one time (to help you know what you will need to be thinking about), reading through the passage/text one time, and then answering questions.  Today we practiced finding the evidence of our answer by underlining the answer in the passage. 
• Word Study: Our spelling words this week are focusing on past-tense words.  This week's words are: picked, jumped, hoped, hopped, melted, camped, looked, wanted & rained.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions!  Have a wonderful week.