Wordly Wise Word Lists

Februray 28th

Good morning,

I hope that you have a fun filled weekend planned for your family!

I wanted to take a minute to give you a few tidbits of information. 

1. Parent teacher conferences

Please click on the link

Conference Scheduler

This will allow you to schedule a parent teacher conference. If you would prefer to meet with me before school, please email me directly and we can set that up. 

2. TCAP 

Starting on Tuesday students will be TCAP testing. Fifth grade will test from 11:00-12:30 and then 1:20-1:50. Those times may vary a bit depending on the amount of directions for the specific testing sessions.

Please help your child be successful by ensuring they have a good night of sleep, breakfast, lunch, a water bottle, and a healthy snack each day.  

3. Homework

During TCAP students will not have typical homework. Math homework will resume the week of March 17th. Wordly Wise & spelling will be back the week of April 7th, and reading response letters will pick back up the week of April 14th.

For homework students might have some Young AmeriTowne vocabulary work, check writing, or other economics activities to complete and they will be encouraged to do something active for 30 minutes! The testing format is a shift from our typical school day so I want them to get out any extra energy that builds up during the day. 

 

4. Young AmeriTowne

The link to register now has all five fifth grade teachers! Please let me know when you have completed the online registration.

Field Trip Registration/Online payment

Thank you for sharing your incredible child with me each day, 

Megan

Parent Input on Success Skills

Happy Sunday!

You might not like this, but parents I have a favor and homework for you! We are all so excited about the sporting events in the news including the Super Bowl and the Olympics. As a class we have been brainstorming a lot of ideas about how to include these exciting current events in our classroom and the students came up with a lot of exciting math and history connections.

I would like to use this opportunity to help students think about success skills that help athletes and adults find success. These include ideas like teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving etc. These ideas are skills that the students use across the content areas but are a little more abstract for kids to verbalize.

Here is where you come in!

I created an online conversation board using a website called, Padlet.

Skills for Success

If you have a moment between now and Tuesday afternoon, I would love if you would click on the link above and record a skill that you use in your own daily life.

To do this:

1. Click on the link: Skills for Success

2. Double click anywhere on the green chalkboard

3. Write the skill in the first line

4. Press tab and if you would like give a short description about how you use that skill

5. Smile and know I am SO grateful for you!!

I have done a few samples on the website that you can look at. Feel free to repeat skills or add ones that no one has included. We will be analyzing your feedback Tuesday afternoon to categorize skills and look for themes. Then with the themes we will have a new lens to view events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics. Students will brainstorm how we will capture the information we gain. I predict they will want an electronic tracking system, but I will also suggest a fun classroom bulletin board!

After familiarizing ourselves with these terms, students will be identifying how these skills help them in the classroom and outside of school. We will look to see if certain skills help certain kids differently, if we may use certain skills in different subjects, and how these skills can help us understand ourselves as learners.

Thank you!

Megan

Problem Solving Reflection

Colonial Guest Speaker Information Letter

Colonial Information Letter

Classroom Update

Good Morning,

Thank you for sending such motivated thinkers each and every day! Based on the feedback from the kids, it sounds like each of you had a wonderful vacation filled with fun family celebrations.

As we kick off 2014 in our classroom, I thought I would give you a quick update on our academic focuses.

One important item is that we will have a Colonial America guest speaker, Miss Veronica, coming in on Monday, January 13th. Informational letters (printed on yellow papers and placed in Thursday folders) were sent home before break, but I thought I would send a quick reminder. The guest speaker will come to Gold Rush and provide an interactive presentation, Children's Lives in Colonial America. It is a wonderful and authentic view into what it meant to be a child in the early days of our nation. Students will have a chance to comb wool, spin yarn, make a leather button, practice doing sums and spelling on a slate, use a quill pen, and play with authentic colonial toys. Please send a check made out to GRE for $4.50 by Thursday, January 9th.

In math we will dive deeper into our unit on fractions. Before break we worked on hands on conceptual understanding of fractions and built models that showed equivalent fractions, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions and introduced how number sentences can be used to communicate the conceptual building. We will now extend our explorations to different settings and learn more strategies to convert, compare, add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions. To begin we will identify the connections between fractions, percents, and decimals. This is one of my favorite units to teach because student break through the, "I can't do fractions" mentality. We are using words like, "fractions and I are having a disagreement about...." This allows me to help students identify the specific element that is tripping them up. It may be common denominators, it may be their multiplication combinations, or simply adding denominators when they should be adding numerators. As you can predict, this unit will take the majority of January!

In writing, we will begin working on creating an information piece of writing that connects with our Colonial America unit. Before break, students began publishing a feature article focused on an area of specialty. During flex time this week and next, students will finish publishing and formatting these pieces electronically. We will use these experiences in our Colonial America writing and identify key events, people, and ideas from the time period.

In reading, we are working on the skill of determining importance. To begin this process students worked on developing analogies about what it means to determine importance in reading. Most students have strong abilities in fiction to determine key events, people, and ideas, but when we transfer our thinking to nonfiction, students try to memorize every fact and detail they read without determining which facts, ideas, and people are essential and which are non essential. With this skill we will be analyzing many different non fiction texts connected to our study of Colonial America.

Our Earth Science unit will begin today. The overall goal of the unit will be for students to know and understand the processes and interactions of Earth's systems and the structure and dynamics of Earth and other objects in space.
To do this in class we will be looking at the heating of the Earth and how that will impact different structures in the Earth. In technology students will look at how natural disasters like earthquakes are caused by processes and interactions of Earth's systems. In library students will look at how the Earth and the Sun provide a diversity of renewable and nonrenewable resources. With the integration of library and technology classes, students will have many opportunities to deepen their understanding of Earth Science.

Thank you for sharing your child with me each day!

Megan

Reading Response December 10th

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler


Walk Two Moons