April??? Where has all the time gone? We only have twenty-six days left! They are still eager to learn.

In math they seem to enjoy division. We made it through the 0 – 10 division facts. We just started 2 digit-division. This gets a little confusing. But I’m confident that they will do a great job. We will touch a little on fractions and maybe decimals. Please keep doing the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts all summer.

In religion we just finished up Unit 3, The Body of Christ. We will skip over to Unit 5, The Church Leads. We will be discussing what is Jesus’ law of love, how does God give you faith, hope, and love, and how does the Church help you make right choices?

We have just finished our 5th Theme in reading. We will be doing the theme skills test next and then the following week start Theme 6, Smart Solutions. This is a fun theme.

Spelling is going really well. I did a spelling test from the last four units and they all did a good job. Some students still need a little help on homophone words (words that sound alike but are spelled different). Here is a list of the words we will try to get through in the next month: room, sea, against, top, turned, learn, point, city, play, toward, five, himself, usually, money, seen, didn’t, car, morning, I’m body, upon, family, later, turn, move, face, door, cut, done, and group. This will take them through 295 everyday words they should know.

We are getting towards the end of our English book. I started doing DLP (daily language practice) on the board daily. I write sentences that have several mistakes in them, could be spelling, punctuation, capitalization, mistakes. (Example: its an story that has ben retold in meny different ways ). In this sentence I’m looking for capitalization, contraction, adjective, spelling and punctuation. Since I started this I have noticed several kids are making many silly mistakes when writing sentences. Sadly you will notice a slight grade drop in language due to this. Please work with your child at home with writing sentences correctly.

Ms. Cleveland has finished her observation here in social studies. She did a good job and we wish her luck in the future. We are finishing up another chapter. They will be doing the chapter review on Monday and the chapter test on Tuesday. Then we will finish up the year with the chapter on a growing America.

In science we have read about the water cycle, which includes where is water found, what is the water cycle and what is weather? I hope to finish up this chapter in the next week so we can get started on earth’s place in the solar system. When we go to UMD Planetarium I would like the kids to have a little understanding about the constellations and the solar system. The next project I want the kids to do is draw or design the water cycle. We will discuss this in the next coming weeks.

In art we have been trying our hand at making different kinds of spring flowers with different kinds of media and designs. Flowers are not some kid’s favorite art project. But they are will to try anything as long as it’s not a worksheet or test.

A note will be going home with the dates and locations of the field trips planned for May.