Hello Parents! What a wild week of weather! We did enjoy listening to the thunder on Tuesday morning ! 

Calendar Dates: 

April 18- Spend It or Save It Assembly for 5th-8th graders

April 19- No School / PD Day

April 24- Puberty Video 

April 26- Spirit Day/ Earth Day

May 2- Glow Run Lap-A-Thon

May 3- Public School Band Experience/ Spirit Day

May 15-  Final Book Report Due

May 17- 8th grade graduation

Reading- This week we finished up our story on The Gates. They had their spelling test and weekly test on Wednesday.  On Thursday, we have our spelling pretest and start our next story. This one is about two artists. They will read a short biography on Rita Moreno, the singer and actress. You may know her from West Side Story.  We will also be reading a fictionalized biography on Louis Armstrong.  That is a biography about a person's life, but it has some made up parts in it. I plan on showing the kids some of their performances.  I am excited to read about them. I know their work, but not a lot about their journey. In grammar we are moving on to adverbs. 

Religion- We finished up our Easter chapter with the focus being on The Road to Emmaus story. We are in a new chapter now. We read about the story of Saul and how he was against Christianity. We read a little about St. Stephen and how he taught about Jesus, but then was stoned to death for this. We learned that Saul was there at the time. He didn't participate in the death of Stephen, but he agreed with the people who were against Stephen. It wasn't until Saul lost his sight after his conversation with Jesus and then healed by Ananias that he had his conversion and later became Paul. I was so excited  when I asked the kids who Paul was and they told me...he wrote the Letter to the Corinthians and wrote letters from jail! YES! YES! YES!!! 

Math- We are working on FRACTIONS!! We started by estimating fractions to the nearest 0, 1/2 or 1. Next we are renaming fractions so they have the same denominator. Our next step will be to rename these fractions and then add them.  On Tuesday, we talked about always writing fraction in the simplest form which means one of those numbers has to be a prime number. So, I started the process of teaching them how to simplify using division. As always some get it quickly while others take a little longer, but I think they are happy we aren't doing long division!!! 

Permission Slip- In your child's folder is a permission slip from Mrs. Warner. She would like to take the 5th graders on Friday, May 3, to the public school so they can watch and listen to their 6th grade band. We talked and decided to take all the kids- not just the band kids. I figured the others would enjoy the experience as well! They will need to be at school early that morning and will travel over on the trolley. They will be back by 9 am. They should definitely eat breakfast at home! They won't be able to eat it at school. Please return the papers as soon as you can. Thank you!!! 

Friday, April 19- No School! It is a PD Day for us! We usually take a PD day to do some act of service. This year we are helping out Mark O'Riley fill the food bags at the Food Shelf. Then we are coming back to school and cleaning certain rooms.  Enjoy the extra day on your weekend! 

I hope everyone has a great weekend!  Mrs. Sickels, Mrs. Burg, and I finished our LETRs class on Tuesday night so I won't have that homework! I may actually be able to read for fun! 

I plan on going to mass on Sunday so I can listen to the children's choir!

God Bless, 

Miss Surma