December 17-21

The kids have filled our marble jar!! They have voted on a variety of things for our celebration.  The kids would like to have an electronic/talent/gum day.  To split this up a bit, I will set some time aside this Thursday for electronics and this Friday for kids that would like to share a talent.  Thursday will also be the gum day.  

Spelling: No spelling this week! 

5H Math:  We continue to add and subtract fractions and mixed numbers. Toward the end of the week we will work on comparing and ordering fractions. 

 

Reading/Writing: We are continuing many things from last week.  Students have started typing their final drafts of their stories.  They did a wonderful job revising and editing with one another. Final drafts should be finished before the week is over. We will continue answering open-ended questions in an organized writing piece.  These have been short writing responses.  This week we will also work on planning out multi-paragraph responses using the 4 square. 

We had a great discussion last week about how books and movies are often very similar.  For example, they often have similar plots, problems, "happy endings", and themes.  The kids did a great job identifying themes in texts.  Now we will work on finding the connections between different texts based on these themes. It creates fun conversations between kids about their books, and it requires them to state evidence for their opinion.  

Grammar:  Nouns will start out our week again. We need to think about the rules of plural and possessive nouns and how to correctly show plural and possessive words in our writing.  Then we will move on to pronouns. 

 

 

Science: This week we will review the parts of an atom, and learn about where we can find elements in our world. 

December 10-14

Spelling: Unit 13 this week. Words are uploaded in spelling tab. The base list words are many of the commonly misspelled words that kids should work hard to use correctly in their writing!

5H Math:  Thank you for going over the unit 4 math test with your child and sending them back to school. I am recording what types of problems students need more practice with, and will send them home again once I'm finished.

 

This week we are spending a lot of time adding and subtracting fractions.  Students did very well today adding and subtracting when the denominators were the same.  When we had to find a common denominator, kids were having a harder time. We will continue working on this, as well as adding and subtracting mixed numbers and changing improper fractions to proper fractions.

Reading/Writing: Well, as usual it has taken longer than expected to finish writing our stories.  Kids have known since last week that rough drafts are due Tuesday AM, so hopefully this will not result in a late night for any students. We worked on creating a rubric and I shared the final rubric with the kids today.  They will have this as well as revising and editing checklists to use when perfecting their stories. After revising and editing, we will be typing the final drafts of our stories. 

 

This week we are also working on answering open-ended questions in an organized written response.  Students will also have the opportunity to write their own open ended questions for others to answer. We are working on planning our writing (pre-writing) before responding in sentences using a graphic organizer.

 

We will be looking for common themes in reading this week. Using our read aloud, independent reading books, Time for Kids magazines, and other sources we will think about these common themes (good vs. evil, love and friendship, man vs. nature) and the similarities between these various texts.

 

Grammar:  This week we are studying some common Latin word parts (pre-, in-, sub-, etc.). We are starting a a study of the 8 parts of speech and are beginning by reviewing the types of nouns: common, proper, singular, plural, abstract, concrete, collective, and possessive. Did you know there were that many types of nouns?? This is a review, and we will move into pronouns next. 

 

 

Science: This week we will begin to learn about elements, atoms, and subatomic particles. The class is going to be working with an online interactive periodic table of elements to do a short research project on four different atoms.

December 3-7

Spelling: Unit 12 this week. Words will be uploaded after school Monday. 

5H Math:  On Monday, students will get their unit 4 tests back.  Their homework for the night will be to review the test with someone at home, particularly problems they missed. Students should look through their work and try to solve the problems they missed.  Students need to bring their tests back to me on Tuesday with a parent signature. 

On Monday, we will also complete a "transfer task" which is a multi-step problem that incorporates skills we have learned this year. Students will complete this task independently, but will have the opportunity to discuss their problem solving process with each other. This week we will define vocabulary needed to understand the content in unit 5: fraction, numerator, denominator, "whole", equivalent.  We will practice showing fractions of whole numbers with manipulatives, ordering and comparing fractions, and finding equivalent fractions. 

Reading/Writing: We will spend more time sharing reading response letters this week. We will read a story from our Harcourt anthology: Across the Wide Dark Sea.  The kids will take the comprehension quiz Thursday.  This story is a historical fiction piece about the journey of the Mayflower.  We will be making connections to social studies as well as reading this story as a writer.  Since students are writing their own historical fiction stories, we will be able to look at the methods of the author in this story.

My hope is that students will have their rough drafts done by Wednesday on their historical fiction stories.  We have been learning about uses of commas, and kids will take a quiz Tuesday.  Then we will review the use of quotations to show speech to aid in students' story writing. 

Social Studies: This week we will learn about the Spanish and French exploring North America as well as the French and Indian War.  Kids should get their social studies tests back on Thursday!