April 6-10

I hope you all had a nice week with your kids :). We had a good first day back! By the way, Mrs. Donaldson, our music teacher, awarded 5H the "Golden Record Award" for 3rd quarter! This means 5H earned the most marbles during music class this past quarter out of all the 5th grade classrooms! 

Friday: Report cards will be available online. 

Kids brought home graded papers Monday. 

From Service Club: 

Way to go May Watts! The Service Club fundraiser, "Kids Helping Kids" for the Make a Wish Foundation was a great success! Maybe we should have called it "Community Helping Kids"! Together, we were able to raise $1,435.67​! ​All of your donations will go to helping Illinois kids with life-threatening conditions. Thank you for your help in making children's dreams come true! 

5H Math: This week we are finishing up Unit 6. Kids will take the unit 6 test Thursday. This will include converting within the metric and customary systems (word problems and computation), rounding decimals and line plots. We started learning about line plots today and will continue working with them on Tuesday. Kids need to be able to make a line plot from a set of data as well as be able to answer questions about the data. Wednesday we will review all the types of problems before the test Thursday. 

-Kids brought home their customary converting quizzes Monday. 

Language Arts/Social Studies: 

We finished up our Anchor Text, Red Kayak, before break, and will be reflecting about the book and how it fit the theme "At a Crossroads" this week. 

Kids are finishing up their performance tasks and will be presenting by Friday at the latest. As a reminder, their performance task requires them to write a newscast of a crossroads event in American History. They also write an interview with a person who experienced the event; they need to show their understanding of how the event impacted the person- this is hard! Some kids are presenting as early as Wednesday. Kids need to make sure they are well-practiced- they should be practicing at home. 

Kids will be finishing up reading about the American Revolution this week. The kids have learned a lot about the causes of the war, and this week we need to go a bit deeper into some of the events that happened during the war. We will read about several turning points during the war, which include ordinary people helping the Patriot war effort, important battles, and other countries coming to the colonists' aid. We will be reading multiple texts about the Declaration of Independence, and combining important information from each to gain a better understanding of the document and its importance. The students will also read more about what it was like to be a patriot or loyalist during the time period. Kids will most likely have a bit of SS reading homework this week. Next week we will have another quiz to end the unit. By the way, kids did an awesome job on their first American Revolution quiz! 

We will be moving into science next week, our Astronomy unit. Any astronomy experts that would like to share their knowledge with the class? We will be learning about stars, with a focus on the life cycle of the sun.