Week of January 27th

Week of January 27

 

I hope all of you are staying nice and warm this week! It is looking like we may have a very long winter ahead of us :) I think the students will agree that we have had to work extra hard over the past week to make sure we are still accomplishing all that we need to. I am extremely proud of everyone for staying focused and putting forth their best effort despite all of the hectic changes to our schedule!

Reading: Our weekly reading story this week is Tripping Over the Lunch Lady. The reading strategies we will focus on this week are making predictions and inferences. We will also practice setting a purpose for the texts we read. We will be finishing up our stations from last week, as we were not able to complete all of them due to the delays.

Math: We will begin Unit 9 this week, which will cover coordinates, area, volume and capacity. This week our main focus will be on coordinate graphs. We will study coordinates and the relationships between ordered number pairs and transformations of figures in a plane.

Writing: This week we will continue focusing on detailed and descriptive writing. Last week students worked very hard on developing sentences and making every word count. We focused on using different parts of speech in order to pack sentences with the RIGHT word choice. Students created 3 sentences about winter and entered their favorite sentence into the “Single Sentence Contest”, where we will pick a fifth grade winner!

 

Bullying: This week we will begin our ROAR bully lesson. This is a lesson we will be doing across the fifth grade and we are all very excited about it! This lesson will allow students to reflect on what they personally do to overcome challenges or stand up against bullying. Students will work on “My roar is…” statements. (Example: My roar is..I always tell an adult). We will incorporate these statements along with some choreography to make a video with the whole fifth grade! I assume that the students will be thrilled, as I have quickly learned during indoor recess that we have many skilled dancers in our classroom J

Spelling: Students will have a spelling test on Thursday over the words for Tripping Over the Lunch Lady.

Social Studies: Please contact your child’s Social Studies teacher for an update in this subject.

Science: Please contact Mrs. Smith for an update in this subject!

Other Notes:

This Friday the fifth grade will be taking a field trip to East Middle School for the Music Introductory program at 9:00am. We are expected to return at 10:20am.

As always, please contact me with any questions or concerns!

Miss Hetzner

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Week of January 20

Reading:

Our weekly reading story is Weslandia. Students will be working on drawing conclusions by using their own knowledge and clues from the text. In stations, students are working on comprehending non-fiction texts and identifying various features, using figurative language to draw meaning from texts, and identifying the author’s purpose.

Reading Counts:

As a reminder, all students need to earn at least 30 Reading Counts points this 9 weeks. The deadline for this goal is MONDAY, March 10. They can take quizzes at the beginning or end of the school day, during reading stations, and at recess when I do not have recess duty.

 

Math:

This week we will be finishing up Unit 8, which covers fractions, fractions, and more fractions! The Unit 8 test will be given on FRIDAY. We will work on the study guide together in class on Thursday. However, if students do not finish the study guide it is homework Thursday night. Last week the concepts that students seemed to struggle with the most were 1) adding/subtracting with mixed numbers and 2)  finding the common denominators in order to add/subtract fractions. These are just some suggestions to use while studying J

 

Writing:

Last week we worked with Mrs. Copeland on responding to prompts with an organized and detailed response. Mrs. Copeland and I have been meeting with students to compare students’ response to the prompt last year in the fourth grade, with students’ written response they have developed this past week. We will also begin working on compare and contrast writing this week. Students will begin to draft a compare and contrast writing that compares the traits of 2 different animals.

Spelling: Students will have a spelling test on Thursday over the words for Westlandia.

Social Studies: Please contact your child’s Social Studies teacher for an update in this subject.

Science: Please contact Mrs. Smith for an update in this subject!

 

Other Notes:

                You may have noticed that there are no grades up yet. I am having trouble getting into the system to enter grades, but am hoping to get this technological problem fixed within the next few days J Grades should be available by the end of this week!

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

Miss Hetzner