Week of April 28th

Happy Monday!

I hope that everyone had a wonderful and relaxing weekend.

This week (starting tomorrow) will mark the beginning of ISTEP testing. Testing will continue until next Tuesday. With that said, please make sure your child is getting plenty of rest and eating a big breakfast to fuel their brains! :) The students have been working so incredibly hard throughout this semester. I am completely confident that they are going to ROCK this test! As I know many of them get stressed, I will be reminding them tomorrow to RELAX and be CONFIDENT in their abilities. They have been preparing for this for a long time, and I have complete faith in their capabilities.

Schedules will be a bit different this week due to ISTEP. On Tuesday and Wednesday, our class with will take the math portion of the exam from 9:40-10:13. On Thursday, students will take the first session of Language Arts from 11:15-11:56. On Friday, students will take the second session of Language Arts from 11:24-12:07.

Reading: There is no reading street story this week due to ISTEP. Instead we will begin our class novel, Shiloh. I am very excited for this book, and I think the kids will really enjoy it! I thought this would be a nice way for the kids to relax and enjoy a good back after testing :) We will continue stations this week. In guided reading, we will focus on making inferences with informational texts. In stations, students will practice identifying figurative langauge in texts, differing between facts and opinons, and summarizing nonfiction texts. These are all things that will be great review for students as they begin Language Arts testing on Thursday.

Math: We will begin Unit 7 this week in math. This unit will cover exponents, negative numbers, and order of operations. Students will not be receiving math homework (or any homework at all this week). All math work will be done in class.

Writing: This week we are going to be doing a lot of review over combining sentences (using conjunctions), identifying and placing modifiers, and appositives. Students reviewed these skills last week, as we did class rotations with the rest of the fifth grade. This week we will work on making sure we have mastered all of these skills!

*** Please contact me with any questions or concerns regarding this week.

Thanks!

Miss Hetzner