A short and Busy Week

It may be a short week, but we have been keeping busy.  Our Alph-Biography project is moving along, and we have been working really hard to develop our conceptual understanding of multiplication.  Ask your child to show you the three ways we have worked on multiplying two digit numbers (or larger) by two digit numbers.  We call them the expansion method, the lattice method, and the box method.  As long as it works for them, I am happy to see students use any approach to get to their answers, so hopefully one of these will seem like a good fit for your child.

In science we are wrapping things up on our flight unit.  This week we will finish our mini projects on a flying machine that each student chose.  We spent some time yesterday getting pointers on how to build paper airplanes (gliders really).  This weekend students have a homework task linked to the airplanes.  They need to research, build, and test paper airplane designs on their own.  Next week we will be having a set of airplane challenges, in our Air Olympics, so students need to be able to choose a design that will work best for them.

Some designs can be found at the following site...

http://www.origami-instructions.com/paper-airplanes.html

Here is a quick video we watched today on the Wright brothers' first flight...

Unfortunately our trip to McKellar was cancelled for this week, but we will be looking for dates later in the year to get to the park again.  Thanks to those who volunteered to come along on the trip.  We have another park trip in two weeks, so please let Ray know if you are able to make that trip.

IEP's went home today.  These are the first drafts.  If your child received one, and you would like to discuss it, please contact Ray to make arrangements.

Keep Nov 11th on your calendars, as we will be sending home information on our trip to the cenotaph that day.  We hope to perform two songs there with School of Rock, and will need volunteers to come along and help out.

Students have one other homework assignment for the weekend.  They need to find a headline, and bring it in, along with a quick summary (one to two sentences) of the main idea in the article.  They will be writing two alternate summaries, and asking classmates to guess the true story from the three choices.  Please try to help your child come up with a headline from a newspaper or magazine.