Week of October 5th - 9th

Important Dates:

Thursday, October 8th	Community Open House  (to see the new facilities)
Friday, October 9th	Picture Retakes RAVE Assembly W/MandiTori -Happily Ever After Drive             2:15-3
Monday, October 19th	Parent Club Mtg  6:30 @ BV
Tuesday, October 20th	5th Gr Band Rehearsal in gym  2:35 District Wide Band Concert  7PM  BP Field House
Thursday, October 22nd	Fundraiser Order Pick Up  3:15-5:30pm

Resource Language Arts:

Students will read the story, “Annie’s Gifts” and work on filling out a story map with the important elements of the story. In addition, we will have our vocabulary test this week on the words that were glued into their notebook from last week. Students are doing very well with starting to use their words in their everyday language! For guided reading groups this week, we will start reading weekly readers using the “AEIOU” strategy. 

Resource Writing:

Students will finish their stories they started last week with focusing on retelling the story from inside of it using the step-by-step strategy. We will also add more ideas to our notebook to generate ideas for narrative writing as well as focus on increasing our writing stamina!

Second Hour Math:

We will continue with chapter 1 on fractions. Students will learn how to add and subtract fractions and mixed numbers with unlike denominators, and use estimation to solve problems involving fractions. Students should review and expect to take the chapter 1 test next week.

Advanced Math:

This week we continue to work though proportions, how to solve them and how they can be written.  Once we finish the proportions, we will take our last quiz for this unit and then begin reviewing for our first test that will be on Monday, October 12th.  Also be sure to talk to your child about the 60 minutes required for Math either through Moby Max or Khan Academy.   I have spoken with students regarding the fact that they should not be waiting until Thursday night to complete their minutes but managing it by doing a little every night.  

Science:

In Science, we are continuing our work on populations and then will be completing a lab experiment involving how to understand populations. Hopefully, we will get the opportunity to start how living things interact.  We will begin by discussing camouflage and how animals adapt to their surroundings.  

Achieve 3000:

Students this week will read an article called, "Mammals Like You've Never Seen Them".  We will continue to work on vocabulary within the articles as well as begin working on summarizing small paragraphs.  

Language Arts:

Book clubs working hard together :)

Our focus skill this week will be identifying theme or underlying message within a story.  Finding theme requires inferencing skills to look deeper into characters and how they solve their problems.  We will look into character actions to determine their character qualities and motives.  All of this will require students to tap into higher level thinking skills to get to the deeper meaning the author is trying to convey.  Because this will take quite a bit of practice to conquer, this will be our main focus skill for several weeks.  Theme is a standard that will be assessed for first quarter.  Book clubs will finish their books this week and answer a final post responding to how the author ended their story.  Word study packets this week will focus on suffixes.

Writing:

One of my goals in writing this week is to simply  have students get more written on paper!  They have so many ideas and stories that they love to raise their hand and share in class about injuries or pets or funny things that happened...now I just need them to pin them down to the page!  We will use the strategy of flash drafting.  From here, students will be doing work to use narrative rubrics to self-assess their stories and set goals for how to make their writing better. They will also use partners and small groups to read their work aloud (which is a great writing strategy!) as well as learning to listen and give advice on how to make a narrative better.  If time allows, we will move into redrafting to pull out the meaning in a story.

Social Studies:

This week we will be starting a new unit on explorers.  Students will be introduced to the essential questions and activate prior knowledge by brainstorming what we already know about exploration.  (Students may be asking you to help them brainstorm as well!)  We will discuss theories on how the first Native Americans arrived in the Americas and what prevented Europeans from exploring the Americas for so long. To help remember concepts taught, students will often have homework to both write and draw a response based on what was learned.  Exploration standards are taught but will not be assessed in Powerschool.

Here are some additional photos from the last couple weeks for those of you who do not use the Twitter account.

Love the enthusiasm! We'll work on spelling... :)

So many amazing examples of teamwork!

Nature Hike!

 Critter Catching!

Friday Fun: SPOONS!!! :)