Newsletters

April 26, 2019

Dear 5B families,

We have had a busy week!

In Language Arts we finished Home of the Brave. Most of the class said that they loved this book. Some of their responses were:

• it was funny at parts, especially when Kek didn't understand something
• it was a different genre than I usually read, and I still liked it!
• it was sad at the beginning, and then got really happy

To wrap up the novel, students are writing a deleted chapter from the book. This is such a fun assignment, and I am loving seeing so many creative ideas! I can't wait to read their finished pieces next Tuesday!

We wrapped up our fractions unit this week with a test on multiplying and dividing fractions. Tests will come home next week, so please keep an eye out for them.

Our next unit in math will be a combination of decimals with data and graphing. We are starting with a review of decimal concepts (reading them correctly, adding and subtracting, comparing, and rounding). Then we will move on to multiplying and dividing decimals.

In social studies we are studying different types of government. Students are making posters in pairs (with someone in 5A) on a type of government. Pairs were assigned either republic, theocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, or transitional government. This assignment helped students practice a number of skills while learning about government. The project required them to:

• practice pre-planning a visual design
• research, synthesize, and re-word information found online
• choose visuals that add to the information
• organize information on a large poster paper
• compromise with a partner

They will be presenting their posters next week!

In a combination of math and social studies, we will also be learning about graphing, including studying graphs and making our own. Our first topic is women in politics. We began with an activity where students had to make guesses about percentages of women in head roles of government around the world. So far their answers have not been surprising: more than half of them thought that the United States is leading the way. After watching the video below, however, they saw a number of women who are heads of state in a lot of countries they didn't expect, and this made them realize that they haven't seen the same in the United States. Next we will begin to take more of the data on women in politics to interpret and make graphs.

Best,

Rebecca

April 12, 2019

Dear 5B families,

We have had an easy-going week in 5B.

On Monday when it was raining, we capitalized on some extra gym time by playing games. We played a game called Transformation. Everyone starts out as an egg and they rock, paper, scissors another egg. Whoever wins becomes a chicken. The chickens rock, paper, scissors each other and whoever wins becomes a T-Rex. The T-Rexes rock, paper, scissors each other and whoever wins becomes royalty. Then we played toilet tag, where when you get tagged you freeze in the position of a toilet and your arm has to be "flushed" by another player in order to rejoin the game. We are clearly very mature in fifth grade! :D

Humanities

We are in the middle of Home of the Brave and the class continues to enjoy reading it not only for the story, but also to practice their skills at finding signposts and figurative language. The book allows us to make strong connections to social studies, both current and past events in the U.S. and the world. For example, we read an article this week about the cattle economy of the Maasai people, and the class noticed many similarities between the Maasai people and Kek's people from Sudan. Home of the Brave has also brought up the topics of America as a melting pot of many different people, as well the idea of the "American Dream," that America is a land of opportunity. We asked ourselves, is it really a land of opportunity for everyone, or are some people more advantageous than others?

Next week we will watch a thought-provoking and moving documentary about the Lost Boys of Sudan called God Grew Tired of Us. Students last year had a lot to say after watching the documentary, so you may want to preview it so that you can continue the discussion at home. (One note: There are a couple of difficult images at the beginning, and when we watch it we give kids a heads up before them in case they want to avert their eyes.)

In math this week we continued with multiplying fractions, but branched out to include multiplying mixed numbers and simplifying after multiplying. We also continue to work on word problems, and have practiced using bar modeling to demonstrate our thinking.

When we learned how to multiply a fraction by a whole number, I asked the class to draw what they saw in their heads. I loved the different ideas that they came up with!

On Friday we worked with Ms. Bookstein's class to visualize dividing fractions. We used Cuisinaire rods to represent breaking fractions up into smaller pieces. The class made the connection that dividing fractions by whole numbers is just like multiplying a fraction times a fraction! When you were in school, you probably learned to divide by taking the inverse of the second fraction--our goal was to show them how and why this works so that they are more likely to remember the process. Research shows that if you understand why something works, you are more likely to remember it than simply memorizing the algorithm.

Next week we will continue to practice dividing fractions, and then we will take a test on multiplying and dividing fractions the week of the 23rd.

I hope you all have a great weekend!

Rebecca

April 4, 2019

Dear 5B families,

This has been a fun-filled and thoughtful week!

We are still reading Home of the Brave in Language Arts, and the class is really starting to get into it! It's a sadder book, especially at the beginning, and it always takes classes a little bit of time to settle into it, but once they do, I love watching them fall in love with the book. The book is written into several parts, and each part is preceded by an African proverb. We finished Part 1 this week, which allowed us to look back at the part 1 proverb and delve more deeply into it. The proverb that begins part 1 is: "When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." The class very adeptly understood that this directly connects to the book. They said that when there is a war, it is the people not fighting (the civilians, to use a vocabulary word) who really suffer. In the book, it is Kek and his family who are hurt by the war in Sudan. The book has also been bringing up a lot of discussions about empathy, particularly empathy for those who have gone through something horrific.

As we read, we are reviewing figurative language, and the class is getting better at finding similes, metaphors, and examples of personification. Here are some of the examples of their favorite figurative language phrases from the book so far:

• "this cold is like claws on my skin" is a simile for how the cold hurts Kek
• "his car coughs and burps" is an example of personification because the car is stuttering and doesn't work very well, but it doesn't actually cough and burp
• "snowflakes tap at the window like mosquitos" is a simile for the noise the snowflakes are making, maybe they are annoying like mosquitos
• "holes in the room" is a metaphor for the family members Kek has lost
• "the snow talks" is an example of personification when Kek steps on the snow and it makes noises under his feet

We watched a video about a man who learned to ride a bike that was constructed "backwards," meaning that when he turned the handlebars, the wheel turned the wrong direction. He thought it would be so easy! But it turned out that it took him 8 months (8 months!) to learn to ride this bike. He said that, while he knew how it worked, that didn't mean he understood how to make it work. The man then tried to ride a normal bicycle again, and he was embarrassed and frustrated that he couldn't at first! He discovered that it was actually impossible to forget how to ride a bike. Then, the man taught his son how to ride the bike. His son was 5, and it only took him 2 weeks to learn because kids have more neural plasticity than adults, meaning they can learn things faster.

This video led us to discuss some great Words of the Wiser, and how they can relate to our own lives:

1. Knowledge does not equal understanding. Several students connected this to math class, and said that, while they knew how to multiply numbers before this year, they didn't actually understand why it worked. (Obviously, I loved this connection!). I was making the same connection with our lesson on multiplying fractions this week (more to come on that in a bit).

2. Try things that are hard and don't give up, especially when you're a kid and your brain is more pliable to learning new things. This also led to a great discussion about how you might embarrass yourself by trying new things because you might fail in front of other people. Some students were comfortable with this level of embarrassment, and others were not. (Great topic of conversation to have at home!)

This week in math we learned to multiply fractions. Working with Ms. Bookstein's class, we did a fun activity in which we imagined that Ms. Bookstein had eaten 1/3 of a pan of brownies, and that then Mrs. HK ate 1/4 of what was left (or 2/3). Multiplying fractions actually means finding a portion of another portion, which could be illustrated using a simple rectangular brownie pan! Drawing it out helped students see that they could take the left over 2/3 and split it into 4 equal pieces, and if they made the whole pan into equal pieces, there would be six pieces. Therefore, the answer was that Mrs. HK ate 1/6 of the whole pan.

In the words of Jo Boaler, Stanford mathematician and teacher, "Many students learn to multiply fractions using a rule or algorithm, but lack any understanding of how they arrived at their answer or what their answer represents. If students have learned to multiply fractions only by multiplying numerators and multiplying denominators, they may get correct answers, but then go on to make errors when adding and subtracting fractions. It is very important in all mathematics for students to work with meaning, understanding what they are doing and what is happening" (from Mindset Mathematics).

Then students went on to make up their own problem (still starting with the 2/3 of brownie pan left over). Then we put up the answers students came up with and made them stare at it (with a couple of hints) until a pattern emerged. And then they discovered the rule for fraction multiplication for themselves!

And then on Friday we made brownies and blondies for some extra fun with fractions :)

The finished product!

Best,

Mrs. HK