Dear Parents,
      Happy Thursday!! Welcome back from Spring Break!  I hope all of you had a nice relaxing break whether you traveled or stayed at home.  I had a great time with my kids and spent time with family!  We also got some important things accomplished like graduation invites made and ordered!  Graduation is coming quickly for me!  Too quickly!  The kids are back and all full of energy! I am happy to be back.  When I saw kids at church on Sunday I realized I missed them.  I was happy to be back.  My lack of sleep is catching up with me now and I feel like I need a day to sleep! Track meets started this week also! UGH!

Language Arts -  This week we jumped right into story #3 in our book.  It is called The Ever-Living Tree.  This is a story about the giant redwood trees or "Sequoia's" in California.  It tells a story of the tree from the time it sprouted from the seed to the day it finally fell over.  It talks about the importance of these trees and shows it's lifespan by showing things that were happening all over the world while the tree was growing.  The kids even felt that it was sad when the tree fell.  In grammar this week we have been working on ending punctuation, quotation marks, and punctuation marks for effect (elipse ..., exclamation points(!) and dash).  Tomorrow is our end of the week testing!  Please be sure to study vocabulary words and spelling tonight.

Math - We are working on Area this week in math.  We will finish up that this week and move on to finding area of  combined rectangles and then finding unknown measures.  These to lessons will be the most challenging in this unit and the last two lessons we will have. Then we will take a short test over these skills.  Next up division!!  I think the students have had a lot of fun with perimeter and area!  I know I have.

Social Studies -  This week we started working on lesson 3 which is covering the Civil War.  I used a new strategy on the kids that I have learned during professional development it is called Mark it, Explain it, understand it.  I gave them a couple paragraphs on paper that they could read and mark all over.  They picked out important words or phrases then jotted down notes about them. They found it so fun to mark all over a paper.  Then they got into partners and shared what they marked up and then on poster size, they combined their thoughts.  All their highlights and marks were put on the big one.  I have those posters hanging around the room and they compared things that were the same on all posters.  It is an activity that requires the kids to be up around the room and discussing. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.  I like this activity.  They were learning that slavery played a role in the start of the Civil War but also the argument of who had more control the Federal Government or the State government over the states.  This is a topic that they will need to know for the test.  These discussions help with their understanding of the topic.

Thank you for all meeting with me for conferences.  I am always happy to talk about what is going on with your child. These next 2 months will be full of work.  We will keep  plugging away at all the things we need to learn before 5th grade.  Hard to believe we are at this point all ready.  This really is great class. Be proud of them. I know I am.

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels