Dear Parents,

Today, I had students practice their metric notation today by decoding some dates I wrote on the board as soon as they came in. Then, we did our Math Minute (12 times tables today).

After, we started talking about time using models of clocks. Students had to practice modeling different times. We talked about how a.m. is morning and p.m. is afternoon and where the hour hand should be when it is :30 (in between the two numbers). Students had some difficulty with putting the hour hand in the right place depending on the minutes part of the time and are encouraged to practice this at home. We also talked about quarter past and quarter to as being fifteen minutes after and 15 minutes before. We talked about half past and how that means 30 minutes past a certain hour. Then, I had students draw out various times on clocks for practice and marked them.

This is a great clock game: https://mrnussbaum.com/clockworks-online-game – choose Challenge mode. It will help students to practice in advance for this telling time unit and is highly recommended over the weekend.

After, we had snack and recess. Following recess, we planned out our Weekend Journal Outline. The prompt is: Write which 3 character traits (e.g. honesty, responsibility, respect, truthfulness, patience, etc.) are the most important to you. Explain why. Students should aim for 1.5 pages as this point in the year to challenge themselves. They need to complete the two checklists as usual. Then, students did our Typing Program until lunchtime.

After lunch, we did some grammar work with run-on sentences. Students had to use conjunctions (connecting words) such as but, and, because, so, yet, or, nor to connect two sentences together. This is a common mistake that I am noticing in their written weekend journals when I am going through them.

Then, we did planners and students had community time.

Sincerely,

Ms. Wilks