May 11-15

I hope everyone enjoyed their Mother's Days! 

We have a few special things happening this week:

Tuesday: Multicultural Night is 6:00 to 8:30. I'll be there; hope to see you! 

Wednesday: 

• We are lucky to have another author coming to visit the fifth graders. He'll be able to talk to kids about the writing process. 
• Marble Party- the kids voted for an outside day again for our marble party. It looks like the best weather for this will probably be Wednesday. So we'll have our celebration in the afternoon.
• Service Club meeting after school. 

Friday: 5H and 5C will be going to the Planetarium at Waubonsie Valley High School. Our trip will take place mid-morning and will cause us to be gone during lunch. Kids will need to bring a cold lunch on Friday. We will eat when we return to school around 1:00. 

5H Math: We will have the Unit 8 (Part 1) test this Wednesday. Kids need to be able to:

• multiply whole numbers by fractions
• multiply fractions by fractions 
• multiply mixed numbers by mixed numbers and fractions
• solve word problems involving all of these types of problems
• simplify their answers and write them as mixed numbers and not improper fractions 

Later in the week we'll begin to divide fractions by whole numbers and whole numbers by fractions. We will only be working with unit fractions (fractions with 1 as the numerator, e.g. 1/4, 1/5). This gets difficult for kids because they have a difficult time determining which word problems are multiplication and which are division. It will be important for kids to visualize the word problem to aid in their understanding. 

Language Arts/Science/Social Studies:

We continue reading Maniac Magee, hopefully your child brought home their copy of the text last week to share with you and tell you a bit about the book. This week we'll continue to look at figurative language as we read to understand the text. We'll also be looking more closely at the relationships Maniac has created and how the people in the book have affected one another. 

Our Astronomy test, as you know, is Monday. The study topics were posted last week. This week kids will have the opportunity to determine a related topic to research and eventually write an informational paper. 

For social studies, we continue to learn about the Constitution and how our government works. Kids will learn about the three branches of the federal government and what checks and balances are and why they're important. Later in the week we'll learn about the Bill of Rights.

Word Study: Our words this week will have "vowel teams," meaning two vowels that work together to create one sound. The vowel teams we'll work with are, "ai," "ay," "ee," "ey," "oe," "oa," "ue". Kids will have a quiz this Friday.