April 19

Hey Families! It was an excellent week back from break as we transitioned back to our learning community. Please take some time to look over our information for the upcoming week of learning.

This Week at Brown School

4/19  P2 Character Strength: Appreciation of beauty & excellence

         Wear your P2 shirt!

         Coin War begins (see details below)

          

4/20   Virtual PTO Meeting @ 7pm - please join by clicking here

4/21   Late Start Day - 9:45 arrival

4/23   Ren Baldwin Student Technology Festival entries due

Ren Baldwin Student Technology Festival:

The 2021 Ren Baldwin Student Technology festival wants to see YOUR projects!  Entry deadline is April 15th. Please visit our informational website to learn more.

Can and Bottle Drive  - Volunteers will be collecting them at both the front and back drop off lines every Friday morning in April. Please open your trunk and we will grab the cans from your car. In order to keep the lines moving please stay in your car if possible. We are also holding a Saturday drop off on May 1st from 11am - 12pm at Brown School for those unable to make it Friday mornings. 

Daily Student Health Screener:

Click here for a checklist of symptoms and situations to keep a focused eye on this year. The teachers are logging daily health checks, as well. We are doubling down on health and wellness in efforts to protect our ability to meet for in-person learning. Thank you for your cooperation on this.

Learning this week:

P2: This week we will focus on our character strength of Appreciation of beauty & excellence: "You notice and value the world's beauty and people's skills. You don't take things for granted." 

ELA/Writing: Our nonfiction text structure focus this week will be on the descriptive writing. Descriptive Nonfiction refers to how an author describes a person, place, or thing in a logical order in an expository text. We will explore how an author uses characteristics, attributes, facts, and/or details, about a specific topic to have the reader visualize information.

Math: We will complete our unit on fractions, mixed number computation and measurements this week. Our review day will be on Thursday and we will have our test on Friday. Our lessons for the week are:

Monday: "Introducing degrees as a unit to measure angles" 

Tuesday: "Reviewing line symmetry and explore properties of symmetric shapes."

Wednesday:"Solve multistep multiplication number stories and express their solution strategies with appropriate units and number models."

Thursday: Review Day

Friday: Unit Test

Looking to extend your child's learning in math at home?

I highly recommend having them work on Khan Academy, ixl and/or freckle. Students can continue to work through 4th grade concepts and beyond (for those students who are ready to begin learning skills beyond the elementary level) and provides video explanations to help them work through the content. They also have courses to practice reading and language arts, computer programing (Pixar in a Box has historically been very popular with students in my classroom!), growth mindset, careers and much more!

Science: In science students will construct an explanation of how energy is stored, released, and transferred in chain reactions, such as falling dominoes. Students will build their own chain reaction machine based on an engineering design they will be presented with.

Social Studies: We will continue working on our unit learning about our federal government. Our lessons this week will continue to explore the different sections of the preamble of the constitution and what they mean. Along with this, we will look at what type of government we have in the United States. Big ideas from these lessons are:

• The United States has a constitutional form of government. The Constitution, a written document, establishes the powers and limits of government. 

• The United States is a republic. It is based on the idea of popular sovereignty – that the people hold the power of government in the United States.

• Since it is impractical for everyone to make decisions in government, people give representatives authority to make decisions for them. This means we have a representative government. 

• In a representative democracy like the United States, the emphasis is on values and principles such as liberty, rule of law, popular sovereignty, and the common good.

Homework: Homework each week consists of reading 20+ minutes at home and continued practice on multiplication and division facts 1 through 12. Mastering multiplication and division facts is vital to our learning this year. Students can also work on Lexia Core 5 at home to ensure they finish their required units each week.

Have an awesome week!

Mr. Hernandez