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•  We will bid our student teacher, Kelsey Rozell, farewell the first week in May. We are so excited that Kelsey will be teaching third grade at West Central School next fall. She has been a great asset to our classroom.
•     Math finds us doing multiple-step story problems, including fractions and perimeter and area quite heavily. Students are encouraged to solve problems in a variety of ways. Students should also be multiplying comfortably through times 5 or 6. Knowing basic facts is crucial to preparing for the upper grades.
•  Third graders will travel to Bramble Park Zoo in Watertown on May 16^th to participate in an animal encounter led by zoo personnel.  We hope spring is in full swing by then as we spend a great deal of our day outdoors. Time flies as the last weeks of school wind down, and the days are filled with many exciting things - elementary concert, field day, health fair, and inflatables to name a few.

• 5^th Grade ~ Chris Kucker & Janel Lone
• Time flies when you're having fun. It is hard to believe that we are already into the fourth quarter. With that, brings new materials and even higher expectations of our students as the 5^th grade will become the catalyst grade for middle school. We have been working hard on preparing the kids for the changes that will be coming as they venture out of the secure nest into the world of middle school. I'm not sure all of them understand the changes that will come at them with the "move". We are working very hard to make our fifth graders more independent learners. We as teachers are excited for them and look forward to the advances our school district is making. Fourth quarter will continue to groom them toward being prepared for middle school.
• The state writing assessment will be a big part of the fourth quarter. Our students will soon finish working on their second writing. We are again looking for them to show growth and improve their scores with their writing skills. We are looking for them to do very well as a group and know that they are becoming stronger writers with the process.
• With writing, comes reading. The students are engaged daily in reading passages that match directly to our standards. The stories in our book have been very interesting and the kids have been exposed to a lot of various reading strategies to help them process and build comprehension skills.
•  Our math class has been busy crunching numbers and expanding our math foundations. We are currently working with multiplying and dividing fractions in class. We are also working through our standards by adding and subtracting integers. This is new material for our fifth graders, but they are handling it very well.
•  In Science, we are now racing through our material, literally. The kids were busy making cars out of 2 cd's, a can, some rubber bands and a pencil. Call them "little

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