December 1-5

Happy December, everyone! 

Tomorrow, Tuesday 12/2, kids will take the GATES test. A letter about this assessment came home last week. One session is in the morning and one in the afternoon- each test is about 30 minutes long.

Kids are bringing home information about the Holiday Shop tonight. Our class shopping day is tomorrow- Tuesday. If kids forget/can't bring money/are absent tomorrow, they can shop on Wednesday. 

Kids are bringing home their CogAT scores tonight and most will have at least 1 graded paper (we've had a lot of absences, so some kids may not have something). 

A permission slip was sent home a while ago for a field trip to Hill, please send this back with your child as soon as possible. 

With these 3 weeks of school left before winter break, we will be working hard! Please encourage your child to continue to put their best effort into all they do, every day!

5H Math: Today, most kids got their unit 3 computation quizzes back. We will have the Unit 3 Test on Friday. Since we just took the computation quiz, the test will be mostly word problems. The skills are: 

• add, subtract, multiply and divide decimals 
• most of the division problems will be decimal divided by whole number, one problem will be a decimal divided by a decimal
• divide whole numbers 
• round decimals to any place
• solve problems that involve dividing whole numbers and the answers are in fraction form...for example: 3 pizzas divided by 4 people means each person gets 3/4 a pizza.   

We will work on the last skill from above on Wednesday this week, using the kids' Student Math Journals. To study for the test, kids can use:

• their WINK sheet (What I Need to Know)
• sheets (or quizzes) from the unit that we've written "Unit 3" at the top of, or any pages from SMJ we've done
• notes we've written in our math notebook
• the math tab on the blog...look under "Unit 3"

Language Arts:

Kids continue to read their novels with their partners. Important: Kids need to finish their novel by Winter Break...that means they have 14 more school days. Kids have time every day to read with their partner during school, and they should be reading at home as well. Kids books are of various sizes, so yes, some kids will have more pages to read. Please, check with your child to see that they are keeping up with their books. It's important they are responsible and read the pages they decide upon with their partner. 

Today we started reading a story from our Harcourt books, "Island of the Blue Dolphins," which is actually an excerpt from the novel with the same title. We worked on understanding vocabulary based on context clues and tomorrow we will work on summarizing the most important events of the story. 

We continue to read The Liberation of Gabriel King and work on a variety of standards. This week we will work on: determining the meaning of words based on context clues, understanding the purpose of a paragraph in the structure of the writing (e.g. the purpose of one paragraph could be to describe a character or a setting, while another could be to show the difference between two characters, etc.), and answering questions about the text by providing evidence from the text (text-dependent questions). These skills are ongoing throughout the year! 

Word Study

Today and tomorrow we are finishing up learning about the Greek/Latin root "port". Kids will take a quiz on this root word on Friday. 

I also hope to start a bit more grammar work this week. We'll be learning about different grammar skills, by going back to an old method...anyone remember DOL (Daily Oral Language)? While we may not do this every day, my goal is to work on correcting sentences 2-3 times a week, in the morning as kids come in. These sentences are connected to the Common Core Language Standards and will guide our conversations about accurate grammar. 

Science

This week we need to finish up our magnetism and electricity unit. Today kids learned about magnetic fields, and tomorrow we will learn a bit more about how they are formed. The rest of the week we will work with electricity. Kids will learn what is necessary to make a circuit and what the different types of circuits are (series, parallel). Kids will be able to make these circuits in class as well as an electromagnet- this will show kids how electricity can be used to make a magnet. We will test this unit next week (week of 12/8).