Friday 5/25/18

Here are a few highlights from the past week:

This week was SBAC testing, Monday through Thursday mornings. Each afternoon, students had specials and some time in the classroom. For all of the things below, we spent about a quarter of the usual time on them. Students took 4 different assessments each morning with a break halfway through. They all worked hard to do their best and I'm proud of their persistence with these challenging tests!
In literacy, all student read from their independent books. We also continued to read lots of nonfiction articles in science (more below).
We continued our final writing unit on Personal Essays. Students are finding themes and coming up with their own evidence to support that theme.
In Word Study, we are focusing on vocabulary- specifically we are looking at prefixes, suffixes, and roots.
We continued our new read aloud book The Wild Robot. It's a fantasy book about a robot who ends up on a remote island and has to survive in the wilderness.
We continued our science unit on Sun and Earth Patterns. This week we focused on the moon and what causes us to see the different phases here from Earth. We watched a few videos, read a few articles, and used models to develop an explanation.
All students had time to work on their Passion Projects. They are well into their learning. We have roughly 1 week until the Celebration of Learning. That means students will be spending the next week on a research portion of their project and take time to create their presentation (posters, videos, recipes, etc...)
We did not do a full Outdoor Learning this week due to testing, but we did get out to do some gardening on Wednesday afternoon.
In Math, we continued small group rotation work. Our units right now:
We spent time Friday, preparing for next week's 5th grade Vermont science assessment. This will be on Tuesday and Wednesday next week. It is MUCH shorter than SBAC.
Green Sheets came home this week. Nothing posted on SeeSaw.
Students have created a personal habit or academic goal that they'd like to work on during this last trimester. All students are working on these.
All students are officially using yoga balls instead of chairs. So far, no problems following our agreements!

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

Monday 5/28/18: No School for Memorial Day
Wednesday 5/30/18: Spring Book Order due.
Tuesday 6/5/18: Celebration of Learning and Spring Arts Showcase- Celebration: 530-615pm and Showcase: 615-7pm.
We will be working on the following next week: