April Updates

Units Overview - April

SEL Topics:

• Lessons and Talking Circle on Friendship: Students will reflect on the qualities they value in their friends, explore ways to deepen their friendship and make new friends, and review their commitment to treating one another in a caring and friendly way. 

Amplify Desmos Math: 

Unit 6: Measuring Length, Time, Liquid Volume, and Weight

In this unit, students will generate an understanding of length data in halves and fourths of an inch and represent it on line plots. They will learn to tell time to the minute and estimate and measure weight and liquid volume. Students will use any of the 4 operations to solve problems involving measurement, including elapsed time. 

Sub-Unit 2: Weight and Liquid Volume (Lessons 7–10)

Sub-Unit 3: Problems Involving Time (Lessons 11–14)

Sub-Unit 4: Measurement Problems in Context (Lessons 15–17)

Below is the link to the caregiver resource that includes explanations of key math concepts and problems to try with your student Link 

Amplify CKLA:

Novel Study - I Survived the Great Chicago Fire

What will my student learn? Students will learn comprehension skills through the novel I Survived the Great Chicago Fire. Students will learn character traits, setting, sequence of events, cause and effect and other comprehension skills by using the text. We will also learn to make historical connections using the novel. We will learn vocabulary throughout the text, but we will not have spelling tests for the remainder of the year. 

Home Connection: At home you can ask your child about the characters in the novel, the setting, how the story connects to us today and how they feel about the story. If they like it, why?

I Survived the Great Chicago Fire

Foundational Skills:

In Unit 4, students will enhance their reading and spelling skills by focusing on words containing the schwa sound /ə/, alternative sound/spellings, contractions, possessives, homophones, and homographs. This unit builds an understanding of the varied spellings that can produce the same sound. Students will practice reading and writing different spellings for the /shәn/ and /shәl/ sounds, as well as tricky spellings of the /ə/ and /oo/ sounds. Examples include tion (action), sion (mission), and tial (initial).

The unit delves into the complexities of the English language, exploring contractions (e.g., can’t), possessives (e.g., my dog's), homophones (e.g., hair/hare), and homographs (e.g., wind as both a noun and verb). Students will integrate their knowledge of sound/spellings to decipher these elements, particularly focusing on tricky consonant and vowel spellings.

Unit 4 also promotes an understanding of vowel-and-consonant syllabication patterns in multisyllabic words. Students will work with six major patterns such as VC/CV (e.g., fiction) and V/CV (e.g., humor), applying these patterns to divide words into syllables.

The unit further reviews prefixes such as mid–, post–, semi–, anti–, and multi–, suffixes like –tion, –sion, –scope, –able, –ible, and –ly, and roots including spect, meter/metr, port, mot/mov, form, phon/phone, dict, graph, and scrib/script. Students will explore how these affixes and roots alter word meanings and syntax.

Students will develop their spelling and writing skills through exercises focused on target sound/spellings and morphemes. Dictation exercises will encompass multisyllabic words and various spelling patterns, enhancing students' ability to spell abbreviations and comprehend reading passages. Writing prompts are provided for each passage, along with a sharing routine, during which students discuss their writing and get feedback from peers.

Social Studies:

Unit 4: 

In this unit, students will  continue to explore who we are by investigating the intentional systems people put in place to organize communities and help them work together. They will explore how rules and laws are meant to work and how people can advocate for change when rules or laws are unfair. Children will begin to explore how government is structured and investigate the roles of authority figures at the local, state, and federal level and the responsibilities each level of government has, including tribal government. They will come to understand their own role and power as change-makers and civic agents and how they can work with others in the community to solve problems locally, nationally, and even globally.

Science:

Unit 3: Properties of Materials- Changing Landforms

In this unit, students will use models to investigate how wind and water can cause changes to landforms. They learn that landforms made of solid rock undergo small-scale changes, and that over time, these changes add up to big changes. 

Chapter 1 Lessons

Lesson 1.2: Observations About Landforms

Lesson 1.3: Observing Sand Samples

Lesson 1.4: Gary’s Sand Samples

Lesson 1.5: Making Sense of Sand Samples

Lesson1.6: Explaining Landforms Changes