Fifth Grade News and Happenings

NEWS FROM FIFTH GRADE                                                     WEEK OF SEPT. 14-18

We had an excellent first partial week of school! Your students are wonderful, smart people and a delight to teach. We went through the routines of a fifth grade week with flying colors.

READING

Students are reading novels on their own and we will soon begin a class novel together.  Graphic novels are a fun literature piece, but students must complete their 300 minutes of home reading on regular novels first.

Homework:  Read a minimum fifteen minutes nightly at home in addition to our fifteen minute block at school and normal classroom reading. Please assist your student in making sure this is done. Reading records (this month is a calendar to track minutes) will be due Sept. 30. Their choice of genre is acceptable as long as it is age-appropriate reading level. (4.5 or higher)

Classtime:  I also listen to them read aloud from their current independent reading novel about 3 times per month. (This week I am listening to a selection I chose which is fifth grade level to create a baseline.) Your student should move through their personal choice books at a good pace for them; one student may be moving through books at one-two per week while another may be working through two-three titles per month.

We will be starting our first novel Shiloh next week.  We read the novel aloud together with students taking turns. Part of expected class participation will be to read aloud and to be an active listener as well. Vocabulary and writing activities are pulled from our novel as well as more kinesthetic tasks that work with many learning styles.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Spelling: Lesson 1 came home today. It is due on Friday and we spent a good deal of class time exploring how to do it easily and be prepared for the test on Friday. Students complete the packet and write the words for practice on a separate sheet of paper. (They should have some paper in their homework folder for this purpose.) They staple the practice list to their lesson and turn it in. We don’t do the paragraph or the bonus on the lower half of the last page because our reading units have plenty of both in a more meaningful context.

We are also working on finishing a short form poem about ourselves and a list of 25 things that we are going to turn into an illustrated and elaborated text art piece.  I will be introducing students to our grammar program this week.  More information on that will come home as we are gearing it up for the first year.  It’s called IXL and I am very excited about moving grammar to a faster feedback and more interactive format.

SCIENCE

We talked today about the scientific method.  We condense it down to its bare bones and worked through  both a real and an imaginary experiment.  Good thinking abounded! We'll discuss a couple of famous experiments in class tomorrow.

US HISTORY and SOCIAL STUDIES

We will begin working on map skills this week before we begin our unit on American History.  We have a wonderful, extensive project coming up in January where your student will become an expert on one of our states in the U.S.A. I have encourage them to begin thinking about which state they’d like to study. A good fit might be a state with some kind of connection to your family! (A tip: also check out their state flag-- they’ll be drawing it by hand!)  We’ll make a top three choice list for each child in late November.  

BIBLE

We talked about how to pray as a class today and the various ways we approach prayer time. We also took a peek at a devotional book and our Bible curriculum which we will begin Thursday. Memory verse begins next week.  Students will either write the verse out for a grade or be chosen to say it in chapel (which is also a grade, same points for being brave and saying it up front.) If your child is chosen to say it in chapel, I will communicate to them and you the evening before in order to give them practice time.  If it is too stressful, they may gracefully bow out until later but will need to write it instead. We will write our first verse out on Thursday and practice saying it together daily.

***If your child is new to Cornerstone, they may recite the verse orally to me for the first few weeks and practice writing it; October will be an appropriate time to begin writing it for those students.

GENERAL INFORMATION

PE is Monday, Tuesday, Friday-- please help your fifth grade student remember athletic shoes and good clothes for running, jumping and playing fun games!

PIZZA MONEY IS DUE WED. AT 8:30 AM  

MUSIC is Wednesday and Thursday.

POOL PARTY is this Friday at 3:15 until 4:15.  Permission slips must be returned signed to attend (please read for details about parent chaperoning child.)

CHAPEL is every Wednesday.  Please wear chapel clothes.

CURRICULUM NIGHT!

September 24, 2015 at 7:00 pm

GLOW RUN

October 3, RAC in Lacey.