Friday 11/10/17

Here are a few highlights from the past week:

In Reading Workshop, all students are enjoying their independent reading books. This week everyone who didn't last week, finished their reading response letter. The letter focused on the summarizing skills that students learned about. This skill is very important, but challenging, as many students want to retell rather than summarize. We will continue working on this skill throughout the year and I will be giving lots of strategies.
We continued with our first read aloud book: Wonder, by RJ Palacio. It's about a 5th grade boy who has a severe facial deformity and is headed to school for the first time in his life. The book has some wonderful lessons about acceptance, different points of view, and choosing kindness. It's one of my favorite read alouds to start the year.
In Math, we continued small group rotation work. Right now, we have 3 groups- two 5th grade groups and one 6th grade group. All groups rotate between a small group lesson with me, independent work, and math games or other work with Mr. K (our paraeducator) Our units right now:
All students are continuing their weekly independent typing instruction, using typing.com. This involves lessons and games to help strengthen typing skills.
For the 3rd year in a row, our school has received a grant from Kids on the Move, which allows us to offer extra opportunities for movement! This year we are excited to have Joni back to do dance classes every Thursday afternoon. This program will run for 8-10 weeks.
In Science, we focused on one specific type of scientific investigation- the controlled experiment. Students learned about what they do, the different parts with vocabulary, then had an opportunity to plan and carry out one as a class with support, which we finished on Thursday!
We've returned to Writing Workshop and this week focused on a few more ideas for how to generate writing.
Due to a short week and a few other unforseen circumstances, we did not do Friday Green Sheets this week.
For similar reasons, we did not do Outdoor Learning either.
On Wednesday, our class led All School Morning Meeting! They did wonderfully, considering the circumstances. We decided on what to share on Monday, but then I was out on Tuesday after hurting my back. On Wednesday morning they came in knowing what they were sharing, but hadn't planned much about what to say or how to share it! They did great though and the other classes and teachers thought so too :)

Some upcoming dates, important notes, and things to look forward to in the coming weeks:

Chorus Day- Wednesday 11/15/17
Harvest Lunch- Thursday 11/16/17. Be sure to make reservations, call the office if you don't have the form.
No School: Thanksgiving Break- Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday 11/22-11/24/17
In Reading Workshop, students will continue independent reading. We will be doing a small book project to finish before Thanksgiving break instead of another response letter.
We will continue with math rotations in small groups.
We have finished up most of our work with the carrots: observation, data collection, decimal work, scientific drawing, asking and answering questions, etc... Now all that's left is to do some cooking with them!
Now that we are done with our controlled experiment, that finishes up our learning about scientific practices. The final piece of this unit will be an independent learning project which will give students an opportunity to plan and carry out their OWN controlled experiment. We will begin the planning this week.
Since we have a short week coming up (due to Chorus Day), I will be waiting to see if we do Outdoor Learning or not.
In Writing Workshop we will begin our next writing piece, a personal narrative. Students will also be doing some informational writing with their science projects.
I needed to push Word Study off for one more week, I am hoping to begin this coming week. This will include both spelling and vocabulary work! This will be through a combination of small group work and independent work. We will be using Spelling City for some of this independent practice.
We will continue to use the Smarties activity to help us do some goal setting work for the year.