August Newsletter

August 9, 2019

Heritage and fifth-grade news

newsletters

We do our best to send a newsletter every 2 weeks. We try to not send too much in between these newsletters. Therefore, our newsletters are extremely important to read! Thank you for your support.

Upcoming important dates

Tuesday, 8/13: Picture Day
Tuesday, 8/13: Assessment Day Sign Out will be sent via email at 3:45 pm
Thursday, 8/15: PTO Meeting (6 pm)
Tuesday, 8/20: Back to School Night (6-7pm)
Tuesday, 8/27: Assessment Day (more information coming soon)
Friday, 9/13: Fall Fund Run (more information coming soon)

Technology agreement form for parents

Parent Heritage Technology Agreement Form

Parents: Please fill out the form above as soon as possible. We had the students sign a technology form in our classroom. This sheet can be found below. They do NOT need to complete this at home. It is just for your reference.

5th Grade Chromebook Contract

Back to school night

Back to School Night will be on Tuesday, August 20th from 6:00 PM-7:00 PM. This date was changed! This will have a slightly different format than previous years. We will send out a presentation next week. Feel free to come in and ask questions. We really hope to see you there!

Meet our counselor- Jennifer Winkelmann

Jennifer Winkelmann joined us last April to begin developing a mental health support system at Heritage. She is an amazing resource for our students! Instead of Sustainability, Jennifer will lead our SEL (social emotional learning) double special.

Ms. Winkelmann and Ms. Arnold (our school psychologist) created a form where parents can ask for assistance for their child. This can also be found on the Heritage website on the following page.

Mental Health Form

Chromebook usage

We will be completing an Internet safety course at the beginning of the school year, but please help remind your child about the following items!

Do not share their password/lunch number with anyone.
Do not download extensions on their Chromebooks unless asked to do so by a teacher.
Do not open emails from senders they do not recognize.
They will NEVER get an email asking them to change their password.

In addition, please help us watch over your child's email account. As students begin to use email, it is important to always use the medium for its intended purpose. Thank you for your support.

classroom news

Beginning of year activties

We have been busy setting up rules and expectations in each of our classrooms and getting to know one another better through some fun activities!

We also had all of our students take a personality compass survey. Your child will look at their strengths as individuals and their areas for growth. We will also place your child on a team. The teams are North, South, West, and East. Each team has students with similar personality traits.

They work together as a team to earn points. These points are tallied up in all of the fifth-grade teachers' classrooms and are announced at a bi-monthly community gathering with all of our fifth-graders. These points turn into beans. Their goal is to fill a jar with beans. When each team fills their jar up, they earn a party of their choice up to 30 minutes (examples include extra recess, ice-cream parties, eating lunch with teachers, etc.).

I have included the personality compass survey if you would like to take it yourself to see what "team" you would be on. It is fun to compare your results with your child!

The Personality Compass.pdf

Math

We will begin math on Monday! We place students in math classes based off of fourth-grade teacher notes, a fith-grade pretest, iReady scores from 4th grade, and a math fact fluency test.

In fifth-grade, we do not believe in a low, medium, and high achieving classroom. We do believe that a group of students need enrichment and need to move at a faster pace. The remaining students will be divided evenly so that we have great role models to help in the understanding of concepts. Differentiation to meet student needs will happen in all three classrooms! We also do try to keep students in the same classroom throughout the school year. We do sometimes make slight changes as we get to know our students more, but your child will most likely have a consistent math teacher for their fifth-grade year.

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This may be our last year using the MyMath curriculum. We DO NOT have online access this year through Connect Ed.

Writing

Last year, we adopted Thinking Maps and Write from the Beginning. For the first four weeks, we will be reviewing all eight Thinking Maps.

1st week- Tree Map and Circle Map.
2nd week- Bubble Map and Double Bubble
3rd week- Flow Map and Multi-Flow Map
4th week- Brace Map and Bridge Map

We will also begin the beginning of the year writing assessment.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to email us. We are all happy to help!