We are on Chapter 9 of our Harry Potter novel.  The kids continue to love the story, even though most of them already know it!  It's fun to have discussions around how the movie is different than the book and how they don't remember certain parts of the novel.  We are also concluding our Wonders  Unit on "What do good problem solvers do?" and learning a lot about how our country's government was first created.  Our next unit will focus on folktales and identifying theme.

Our fifth graders have finally concluded their writing project on Florida.  We focused heavily this week on revising and editing--paying special attention to varying our sentence beginnings.  Though they are glad to be moving on from this very long assignment, most say they really enjoyed writing about the topic!

We will continue to work with dividing with multi-digit divisors.  The kids are learning different ways to divide when it comes to long division.  We do teach the standard algorithm along with a few other methods to ensure that each child knows the steps to solve for division.  I am going to add in some division facts tests throughout the week, so make sure your child is going through their facts at home!

This week in science, we began our next unit on "Watery Planet". We learned about the Dust Bowl and have several questions about how such a phenomenon could take place over 10 entire years with such dire consequences.  As we walk through this unit, students will get their questions answered by learning about how much water is on the earth, how much drinkable water there is, the water cycle, etc.