Week of September 10-14

Language Arts: We will be covering chapter 5 of the Growing Your Vocabulary book this week; it is titled "Cardinal Numbers". Here are the Latin and Greek words and English derivatives that correspond to this unit:

Latin Word	Root  (part of word)	English Derivatives
unus (one, single)	uni	unite, union, unison, university
duo (two)	duo, du	duet, duplicate, double, dual, duplicity
tres (three)	tri	triceps, trilogy, trio

The affix that accompanies this chapter is:

 Suffix: -ity meaning “the state, quality, or condition of”

 Your children are responsible for knowing the spelling, origin, part of speech, and meaning of each word above. On the test, they may be asked to give synonyms, antonyms, definitions, number of syllables, etc. for these words. The students are also held accountable for knowing the affixes that are taught. Please study/review all of this information at home! (You should see the GYV book coming home each day.)

This week in Literature, your children will continue reading and discussing The Secret Garden. I hope you can join us for one of our literature circle discussions on Tuesday, Thursday, or Friday. Please see the Sign-Up link to the right to sign up to join our discussion!

            In Writing and Grammar this week, we will continue learning about the expository writing process. Your children did a great job writing topic and number sentences about characters from The Secret Garden. I look forward to reading their three-point sentences on Monday, which follow the topic sentences they wrote last week. We will focus heavily on drafting this week, relying on the corresponding pre-writing checklists while editing and revising. The students will also be applying the expository writing process to what we are studying in science. Make sure to ask your child about which organism they’ve chosen to write about!

The proverb the students will be learning this week is “Every cloud has a silver lining”. We will continue covering Latin and Greek words as well as English derivatives. Encourage your child to study these regularly at home.

History/Geography: We are diving into our fascinating Renaissance unit this week! Has your child shared any interesting information with you about the Medici family or the rise of the humanities during this exciting period in European history? Ask your child to tell you where the terms “uppercase letters” and “lowercase letters” originated – so interesting! :) This week, the students will learn about beautiful Venice, the captivating Leonardo da Vinci, and astounding Michelangelo! Stay tuned for all of the intriguing information your child will learn and the fun activities we will do this week!

Science: Our scientific classification unit is still moving along smoothly. Miss Scheuch is really fascinating the students with her knowledge of life science as we study and classify the organisms in our world!  The students are also showing great sense of wonder by leaving questions on Miss Scheuch’s desk for her to answer after each lesson! This week, we will continue studying Kingdom Fungi and then follow this with a lesson over the last Kingdom, which is Kingdom Monera (also known as bacteria). The students will be assigned a fun in-class project of creating a WANTED poster for a fungus. They will also learn about Charles Darwin, his scientific theory of evolution, and how this relates to our study of scientific classification. The test over this science unit is set for next Wednesday, September 19^th.