5th SPARK

August 2025

Note - If your child is in  5thSPARK and Band, they will be missing two days of SPARK each week as Band take places during 5th Grade RTI time which is our enrichment time.  The schedule doesn't allow us any other options, so the kids will only have SPARK on the days of the week they don't have band. 

We started the year off with a Jacob's Ladder Reading Comprehension Social-Emotional Intelligence/Affective unit of study.  The students watched media to respond to instead of reading a text.  For this unit of Jacob's Ladder, they watched an animated short from Pixar, Lifted.  Ask the kids to give you a summary of this short video.    

The written response questions they had to answer for this first unit were all about:

-Identifying Conditions/Situations that cause Stress
-Applying Control Techniques when those situations arise
-Creating a Plan for Management of those situation
-Identifying Personal and Environmental Barriers  to Achievement

The kids had to work in collaborative teams to write a dialogue between the alien students and his parents, describing some of the thoughts and self talk he was having a result of the experience in the video.   They had to come up with strategies with the parents help and guidance to support as he again attempts to take the test that caused so much stress.  They then had to act that dialogue out in front of the class.  The kids did a great job with this task.  Writing dialogue and knowing how and when to use quotations and to create new paragraphs each time the speaker changes in a  text was difficult, but students now have a better understanding of the use of quotations in their reading and writing.  

Our next Jacob's Ladder unit will focus on a book, The Big Orange Splot.   This book is not meant for their Lexile reading level but intended to help the kids understand more about:

-Identifying and calculating Risk
-Considering Multiple Perspectives
-Engage in Productive Risk Taking
-Knowing Oneself
-Actualizing Potential to Advance A Goal

We'll study literary techniques with this book and learn more about figurative language of simile & metaphor. 

The kids are also having to select from one of two assigned Read Works reading selections each week.  I try to offer both a reading literature and information text passage and the kids then have to chose one and do the reading and associated multiple choice and short answer questions. 

We also learned about all of the dimensions of Depth and Complexity with a deep dive on Details and Changes over Time with a study of sunflowers. 

5th is also now a part of 5th Grade ELA and Math standards-based escape room type challenges and Lock of the Day logic puzzles in our class on Breakoutedu.org