December 4th, 2015 tmills@ms.k12.il.us Mrs. Mills 4E Newsletter December 4th, 2015 tmills@ms.k12.il.us We finished up chapter four in math this week with an extra review day. Your child’s scores from the chapter four test are included in their Friday Folders this week. We have started chapter five. This chapter will include factors, multiples, and patterns. I hope for it to be a bit easier than the last two chapters. We worked on modeling factors by drawing them out as arrays, creating factor trees, determining the divisibility of factors, and finding common factors when comparing numbers. In social studies, we are learning about the Northeast Region of the USA. The students have been given a list of states and capitals for this region and are asked to learn all of these states and capitals. We will be taking a quiz on these on Wednesday, December 9th. We will be going to Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry on May 12th with Mrs. Allison’s and Mrs. Schroeder’s classes. We will be taking regular school buses, so the number of chaperones will be limited to six. Anyone who is interested in chaperoning, please just let me know. Once we are closer to the trip date, I will pull names from a hat to pick who will attend.  We are working on explanatory essays in writing. The students have chosen an animal that interests him/her and are researching that animal this week. They are looking for specific animal characteristics and are filling out a graphic organizer as a way to take notes on their animal. We will then use this organizer to help form paragraphs of information about the animals.