We've started a whole new expedition--one focused on social studies instead of science. It's called "A Tale of Two Colonies." As the name implies, we're looking at two well-known colonies begun by Western Europeans as they moved to North America--Jamestown and Plymouth. What may be different from the traditional elementary school study of North American colonization is our emphasis. We are looking primarily at the issues and consequences of the interaction between the colonists, Native Americans, and imported slaves. So far we've discussed what happened as the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians attempted to coexist.
Reading
For the last two weeks, we've been developing our ability to summarize text. We're learning this is a hard skill to master--to grab the gist of something without saying too much. We've also been working at using Edmodo as a tool in writing our summaries.
Writing
Our current genre study is short stories. We've had fun reading and analyzing mentor texts that run the gamut on mood: everything from the bizarre and twisted ("Galactic Zap" by David Lubar) to the scary ("The Caller" by Robert D. San Souci) to the melancholy ("The Circuit" by Francisco Jimenez) to the thoughtful ("Thank You Ma'am" by Langston Hughes.
Math
This week we reviewed our assessments from unit 3 (geometry concepts) and then made a big gear shift by starting unit 4, which focuses on division skills. So far, we've reviewed factoring and the partial-sums algorithm (a way to do long division that is explained in your unit 4 Family Letter).
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