Welcome Back! It has been a pleasure meeting your children. A big THANK YOU to everyone for all the much-needed support and supplies! Here’s a look at what we have in store for our learning this month. Please mark your calendars for our Meet the Teachers Night, IN PERSON, on Wednesday, September 30th. As a reminder we will be off on September 21st in celebration of Yom Kippur.

English Language Arts (ELA): In our first module, we are focusing on identity and interpreting characters in the story. The story we will be reading is “Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminating Adventures.” Students will work to: Set goals that will take their reading to the next level. Build and grow theories about characters by thinking about a characters’ personality traits, motivations, obstacles, and lessons learned. Defend their ideas by using specific evidence. Finding the main idea and supporting details in text. Learn to formulate questions before, during and after stories. Develop their skills in envisioning, predicting, summarizing, questioning, inferring, synthesizing, and connecting. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Students should be reading at home each night. As they are reading, they should stop and jot to aid in comprehension. (Who is in this part? What happened in this part? How does this part fit with the story so far?) We are working on taking notes about our reading; practicing this at home will help strengthen their writing about reading. Students should focus on building theories about their characters and using text evidence to support their theories. Students should look for context clues for unknown words. Math: Mathematicians will explore the place value of six-digit numbers. We will develop strategies for addition and subtraction of up to six-digit numbers and estimation will be used to check the reasonableness of our answers. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Students should get into the habit of explaining how they arrived at their solutions. Choosing homework questions and asking, “How do you know?” will help your child become more comfortable doing this. Also, have your child practice basic multiplication facts each night. All basic facts should be memorized in time for our next unit! Social Studies: This month students will investigate various roles of people in power to understand how they affect change. Students will also identify people in positions of power and how they can influence people’s rights and freedom. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Discuss with your children the current NYC elections. Have them come with you (if possible) when you vote during the primaries. Watch the news and have current events discussions whenever possible. Science: Our inquisitive student engineers will be working towards answering the unit question “What happened to the electrical system the night of the Ergstown blackout?” After learning that a system is made of parts that interact to perform a function, they read about and engage with several different systems, including a simple circuit powered by a solar cell. Students then learn about different forms of energy and investigate why the blackouts might be occurring in Ergstown. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Ask your child to describe the function of parts of simple systems in the home, such as a can opener or a door e.g. “What is the function of the doorknob for the door system?”

Reading This month we will be completing Module 1 as we also focus on the Essential Question: “How do your experiences help share your identity?” Students will work to: ● set goals that will take their reading to the next level. ● build and grow theories about characters by thinking about a characters’ personality traits, motivations, obstacles, and lessons learned. ● defend their ideas by using specific evidence from the text. ● develop their skills in envisioning, predicting, summarizing, questioning, inferring, synthesizing, and connecting. ● analyze themes. ● use close reading strategies to help them understand the text. ● understand new vocabulary words using context clues and visuals. ● understanding the author’s purpose in a text. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Students should be reading at home each night. As they are reading, they should stop and jot to aid in comprehension. We are working a lot on taking notes about our reading; practicing this at home will help strengthen their writing about reading. Students should focus on building theories about their characters and using text evidence to support their theories. Students should also use context clues to guide them with the definitions of unknown words and ask questions before, before, and after to help them understand the story better. Writing: In October, we will be continuing with personal narratives. Students will be writing a story about a personal experience they had that includes characters, conflict, events, and conclusion. In grammar students will be learning about proper nouns, verbs, fragments and run on sentences. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Practice good handwriting skills. Making sure that their sentences have a capital letter in the beginning of the sentence and ends with the correct punctuation mark. Ask them questions about what they learned in grammar today. Discuss with your children about personal experiences that they had. Ask them questions about an experience they had to help them elaborate their writing. Math: Mathematicians will be learning to fluently add and subtract multi-digit whole numbers. Your child will apply this same logic to numbers greater than or equal to 1,000. Next, your child will be learning strategies to multiply two-, three-, and four-digit numbers by one-digit numbers. He or she will apply strategies involving partial products, including place-value and area models. These patterns also help your child estimate products. Your child can compare the product to the estimate to see if his or her answer is reasonable. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Keep working to memorize those basic multiplication facts!! Social Studies: In October, students will begin to explore civic ideals. During these lessons, they will learn about negotiating, compromising and respecting others points of view. We will study various cultures to see how we are all similar and different and learn about core values that show, “What it means to be American.” In addition, this month students will begin discussing the NYC Mayoral election process including: ● Community Elections ● Constitutional Amendments/Right to Vote ● Candidate Research Science: In October, our systems engineers will investigate the question: What makes the devices in Ergstown output energy or fail to output energy? They engage with a digital simulation, read informational texts, and build simple electrical systems to learn about energy converters. Through a demonstration, they learn that energy has to come from somewhere and that if there isn’t enough energy in the system to meet demand, the system won’t function. ACTIVITIES TO DO AT HOME: Ask your child what source of energy is used to power your home.