Wednesday, November 8, 2017

November News

It was wonderful to see so many of you at our Halloween party.  Thank you again to everyone who made that possible!

We have some exciting events in the next few weeks.  Hopefully, you are reading Dr. Brown's Principal's Blog that highlights big school events.  Last week, the blog discussed our annual Thanksgiving Feast and Celebration of Learning, which will be Wednesday, Nov. 15th.  This is a chance for you to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal with your child and come see some of your child's great work in our classroom at the Celebration of Learning.  Our class schedule is the Celebration of Learning from 12:30 - 1:00 and then lunch from 1:00- 1:20.  You can read more about ordering tickets and volunteering on the Principal's Blog.

Also, last week I sent home a flyer and an email about our first field trip to the Museum of Nature and Science on Wednesday, Nov. 29th.  You will need to register your child using the school's RevTrak system.

We have the week of Nov. 20-24 off for Thanksgiving Break.  I hope you know how thankful I am to have such wonderful families and students to work with each day.  Enjoy your family time together!

Here are the highlights of what we are focusing on in class at this time:

Math
We are just wrapping up our volume unit this week.  Students conducted a performance task of measuring the volume of their desks, supplies, and cubbies to help us determine how to best organize their belongings.  They will also be taking our summative assessment online this week.  Next week, we will start our first unit on fractions.  Fractions are a HUGE part of fifth grade curriculum.  The first part of our study will be on how to represent fractional amounts, making equivalent fractions, and ordering fractions with like and unlike denominators.  You can help this work at home by involving students in cooking and baking and observing fractional amounts in recipes, talking about pizzas, pies, teams, families, and other fun things in fractional ways.  For example, 3/4 of the Hawk family are girls, 1/4 of our neighborhood kids are boys, Dad ate 5/8 of the pizza..... :)

As always, your continued work with multiplication facts at home is crucial in everything that we are working on!

Reading
We have spent a lot of time focusing on the strategy of questioning and will finish our focus on that strategy next week.  After Thanksgiving Break we will turn our attention to visualizing and sensory images.  We will look at how we use that strategy as readers, scientists, mathematicians, and writers.  This is a great time to talk to your child about ways they can "paint a picture" for you of their day, which parts of their reading they can see like a movie in their heads and why, and how they can picture the fractional amounts we are talking about before trying to solve a math problem.

Students are also all engaged in some wonderful novels in book clubs.  They have weekly reading assignments and need to be prepared each week for a lively discussion with their peers and myself.

Writing
We spent several weeks looking at how to organize a paragraph well and we are now looking at how to organize an essay.  We have all focused on the same topic of "Should Schools Sell Chocolate Milk", and have planned, researched, and written all together.  As we finalize these essays, students will then get to pick a research based opinion topic of their own to write about. 

Science
We are loving our life science unit of systems of living things.  We first examined the processes of all living things and the cell as the building block of life.  We are now looking at how cells turn into organs and systems and the functions of different body systems.  First, we have been learning about the respiratory system, and will then move onto the circulatory system and digestive system. 

Skills
Students are alternating between a vocabulary lesson and spelling sort every other week.  Students need to be studying spelling words using a variety of approaches and analyzing the common spelling patterns within their words.  The vocabulary lessons (Wordly Wise) focus on understanding new words and using them correctly in a variety of contexts.