Dear 4B Families:
Happy first week of March and Lent.
This Wednesday, March 5th, we begin the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday. Lent is a time when we are compelled to ask forgiveness for our sins and change our lives for the better. The ashes we receive are a sign that we are ready to change our lives. We will be focusing on three types of sacrifice and practices during Lent that will help us grow in our faith: prayer, fasting from excess and unkind actions, and good works or almsgiving. During Lent the students will be reading special Lenten prayers and Bible readings for the season. In class on Monday the students will reflect on their plans for Lent. It is important that families are also involved so you can support one another. One way we will be incorporating prayer will be in the memorizing of the Memorare. We are reciting the prayer daily at school, and each student has several copies in their filer. The one with the vocabulary on the back should remain in their filer, but please take out the others to use for practice. This is a lovely prayer to keep by your bedside and recite each night. As a school we will be participating in several service related activities to share our gifts with those less fortunate. Each family will receive a rice bowl. We will also once again take part in the Brown Bag Lunch collections for St. Martin de Porres. More to come on this.
Prayer Service: 4B students will be leading the school’s prayer service on Friday March 14th on The Transfiguration and Lent. Parents are welcome to attend in the school hall and it starts at 8:35am. A link will be sent out for those who want to watch online.
Oral Biographies: The students are very excited about the biography project! We talked about how to use the sticky notes to mark passages or ideas they might like to include in their talk. All students have sticky notes in their filer to use at school and home. We shared samples of past index cards created by students (they can be typed or handwritten) and how to organize and plan their approach. One example we shared was just focusing on a small part of the person’s life–like childhood. Read, reread, make sticky notes, then write out some bullet points on the index cards–even practicing speaking using the notes as the famous person.
Spelling: Spelling words for the week were passed out last Friday with a test coming this Friday March 7th. This is a review week as we wrap up the 2nd trimester. There are 50 words from past spelling tests on the list, 30 of which will be on the test. Students should study all of them! No challenge words this week.
Reading: We will be continuing reading Sacagawea and taking detailed collage notes of the story. Next we are reading The World According to Humphrey with a target skill of “theme”. The students are focusing on important lessons the main characters learn over the course of the story. The story addresses the topic of media such as television and the internet—which can be powerful tools that need to be used with regulation and balance.
Math: The students are finally mastering the long division process. The chapter 6 test will take place on Friday March 7th. We are so proud of how hard the students have worked to learn long division! Thank you for your support from home as well. The HW on Wednesday/Thursday will be reviews for the test.
Religion: The students will be tested on the naming of the Seven Sacraments and the categories they are part of on March 6th–this is a day earlier but the students will be ready. All students have study sheets in their filers and we are practicing in class each day as well. Our class work is looking more closely at each of the sacraments.
Social Studies: Along with our reading lessons on Sacagawea, in Social Studies we will be finishing up the journey, reviewing and preparing for our test on the Lewis and Clark Expedition on March 13th. This will be an open book/note test, from both our SS class work and reading journaling.
Science: In the second lesson, students discover the basics of how their eyes work, and figure out some of the causes of vision problems. In the activity, Eye Model, students develop a working model of a human eye. They use a magnifying lens as a model of the cornea to explore how the structure of this lens is related to the function of our eyes.