5th Grade Parent News 3/21
CLASS PICTURES TOMORROW!
Envelopes went home a couple of weeks ago, but more are available in office if you need one.
Thanks for all the parents who worked so hard to make our auction a success. I especially want to thank Jessica Little and Kaci Marsh for putting together our great little package and Debbie Solie for working with our students to create a neat art piece for parents to bid upon. It was a sweet night! Thank you for all your support. Also, thanks for the tissues. We are headed into spring allergies and it’s a little sneezy/sniffly after recess.
Bible: Talking today about ways God blesses us with meeting our non-physical needs, we identified some mentors that God brings into our lives. I loved hearing about the other adults that God has brought into the lives of your kiddos. Our verse this week is 1 Peter 5:5 and it talks about the importance of mentors and being humble enough to receive input from them. Important stuff as we head into middle school! Can you believe it’s just 11 weeks away? I cannot!
Our next service project will be to collect items that food stamps do not cover such as toiletries, toothbrushes, shampoos, toothpaste, and toilet paper. This donation will go to the Other Bank or City Gates to help with needs they have noticed in our community. Please feel free to send any items to the class. We will make posters and let other classes know about it as well. We will take them down to the center just after Spring Break.
Language Arts: Progressive tense was a new thing for several students today, but they got the knack of it quickly- it pulls together several skills at once. iXl is very straightforward but doesn’t let you skip a step. Students must figure out what the patterns are before it allows you to move on. I encouraged them to listen for and try to trick someone into saying past, present and future progressive tense. This is the tense we are most likely to use when speaking, so I’ll be checking in with them tomorrow to see if that’s still in the neurons after a night’s sleep. We are also going to work on present perfect and past/past tense this week along with using a modal verb (we called them something else when I was a kid, but it’s must, might, may, etc. that express condition, ability, near-certainty, advice like “you should!”). Lots of verbs as we think about the way we write and create language are good growth for writing.
Reading: We’re about ⅓ of the way through our book, “Files” for short. Students are enjoying Claudia and Jamie’s shenanigans and the author’s knack for interesting words. We pulled high level words from the text today and are busy creating a game of Balderdash for classroom use. We’ll also learn about the Renaissance and look at works by Michelangelo and other famous sculptors. When we’re done, we will write a paper comparing the two books we’ve just read in class. Kids are doing a good job of reaching for new genres in their personal reading. This time of year is when I notice most of them trying something new, whether it’s a book of fairy tales or one of our poetry anthologies. I loved that one of my boys picked up a series that isn’t written for girls but which features a set of sisters and plowed right through the whole thing-- and now the other guys are eyeballing it!
Social Studies: Deep into the American Revolution and the initial few years as our country worked out how to combine 13 very different ideas about government. This is a high interest unit as we observe the current race for president. We have a neat assignment for tomorrow: write a letter to George Washington about things he might have done differently from a perspective of 200+ years later. State song is due this week-- state recipe card next week and the governor report after Spring Break. Then we’ll work on tying it all together with a table of contents and a bibliography, title page, and cover. “Booth” information and photos of past years will come home or be up on the class page after conferences. States and capitals #31-39 this week.
Science- we just received some new kits from our TwinStar grant that allow us to build battery powered electrical circuits this week. We will spend some time with force and energy and motion after this week, then we will spend a little time talking about ecology later this spring. This class gets a LOT of spillover from having the middle school meet in their classroom. They are sponges!
No comments:
Post a Comment