Thank you everyone who came to Fall Conferences!  It was so nice chatting with you about your child's progress.  Please know I am always available to meet or chat--just shoot me an email and we'll find time!

This week, we took the Progress Monitoring assessment for this portion of our Wonders Unit.  This will help me gauge where the kids are and how far they've come since the beginning of the year.  We also did a fun poetry project based on our Harry Potter novel.  The kids picked out a character from the story we have met so far in our reading and wrote a haiku poem from the point of view of their character on the first day at Hogwarts.  They all did a tremendous job!

The 5th graders continue to work on answering the question: Should Florida's government use funds to protect natural resources or develop land?  Our focus is to be able to integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write about the subject knowledgeably while make a clear claim. The students have a great start on this project and I am looking forward to seeing where they will go with it.

Topic 4 continues this next week with the focus is using models and strategies to multiply decimals.  For a quick review, check out Khan Academy's videos on how to multiply multi-digit numbers with decimals.

This week in science, we were able to study food webs by figuring out what the dinosaurs probably ate.  After plotting our food webs, we took away the sun and discovered that, if the theory of an asteroid hit is correct, the sun would have been blocked out around the world and possibly caused the extinction of thousands of species.  (I stressed that this is only one theory out of many, not a definitive answer.) The students also had many unique possibilities of why dinosaurs are no longer around and we enjoyed sharing our ideas and theories.