May is a very busy time of year for everyone, and especially in fifth grade. I'll be sending a lot of emails out with updates on end of year events, so please read those emails with the necessary registrations or document dates. A few dates to keep in mind:
- April 20th - No School
- April 25th - Tour of Cimarron Middle School - a permission slip was sent home last week
- April 27th - Talent Show
- May 10th - "Growing and Changing" talk - I will send video links next week
- May 22nd - Outdoor Ed trip - registration and information coming soon!
- May 23rd - Field Day (this is a date change from my previous blog)
- May 25th - Last Day of School - picnic at Tallman Park/Fifth Grade Slideshow at school
I sent home a permission slip for our tour of Cimarron Middle School last week. Please return this ASAP. No payment is needed. Our puberty talk is scheduled for May 10th so I will be emailing you in about a week with the links to the videos we will be showing students.
The following information will describe our curriculum goals for the rest of the year.
Math
We are focusing our work right now on multiplication and division with decimals. Students are really striving to master strategies for solving computation problems efficiently and effectively and to make sense of how decimals impact the outcomes.
Multiplication and division will continue to be a focus for the rest of the year, but we will also have units around patterns and algebra as well as 2D geometry. These links from our math curriculum are a great resource for games as well as support of the math understandings we will be focusing on.
Reading and Writing
We have been focusing on the reading strategy of determining importance. We have really tied this into our writing work of our Colonial America informational research reports. Students are practicing researching topics around Colonial America and choosing what is important to remember and include. We will end our year focusing on the strategy of synthesizing. Synthesis is when readers put together all of the reading strategies to form thoughts, opinions, and conclusions about topics. As we focus on synthesizing in reading we will be combining our own thinking with the research and information we gain about Colonial and Revolutionary America as writers. Our final writing units will combine our reading strategies as well as writing goals in historical informational reports.
Social Studies
We are integrating our reading, writing, and social studies work to learn about the forming of our country through the Revolutionary War. Students have been gaining background on early settlements, the thirteen colonies, and we are now looking at the events leading up to the Revolutionary War. We will be examining multiple perspectives of this time period, major events, and analyzing the primary documents that formed our government. It is a really engaging topic and I hope will lead to great dinner time conversations at your house! If you've ever wanted to plan a trip to Washington, D.C. with your child, this is the summer to do it :)!
