ClubSmith Classroom News
Update April 12
April 12, 2018
Over the break, I am hoping the students will continue reading. I have asked all students to bring home two books and to spend a little (or a lot) of time this vacation reading. Students will earn Books for Bikes coupons as well as further develop their reading skills.
When we return we will be in our final weeks of fifth grade. I hope to end the year focusing on organization, following through with nightly home learning and building the skills each child will need to be successful in middle school.
I am excited for our final weeks. We will finish our engineering project, participate in a lot of mathematically focused projects and kick off the learning that will result in our milestone learning experience of publishing a book. This book will be a capstone of your 5th grade student’s learning at C.K. Burns School.
I hope you have a restful and restorative break and I will look forward to our last weeks of learning together. For those families who were unable to schedule conferences, I will ask that we finish those in April.
Thanks again for your support with at home reading.
Sincerely,
Nancy Smith
Update April 2, 2018
We are beginning the month with a renewal to our planners and our organization. We have a final ten weeks to get routines down that will help organize us for middle school. Please help locate your child's planner if they have lost it. Home learning is also posted on the first tab of the website.
We will be committing to finishing the year strong - reading, reading and more reading will be the focus in April. I want to be sure students have the necessary reading skills for the learning they will encounter in middle school.
Social Studies this week will involve connecting an object to the past - if your child has not taken a photo of an older object and examined it with you (many did this during the home visits) that will also be part of the week's work.
The chair challenge got sidelined in March with all the changes to our schedule and the testing. We are back at it and look forward to making our prototypes this week.
Math is going really well with students mastering addition and subtraction of fractions and also nailing the art of multiplying fractions. I'm very proud of the new 'I can do it' attitude in math.
We will begin our Milestone Learning Project right before April break and our focus will be upon selecting a piece for our anthology to be published. Stay tuned for more information.
Update March 14, 2018
Oh my...tomorrow we will be fifteen days into March and will have had three snow days! I believe that is a first for me. I love this class, however, the idea of posting updates here the last week of June is not a particularly appealing thought.
That said, the snow days have given me some time to think about some fun math lessons. I have been doing some real life work around fractions and we will put our expertise into practice when we bake cookies this week. Yummmmy - this will be a fun way to illustrate our understanding. Also this week we talked about probability and looking at math in the world of sports. I filled out my bracket and have asked students to take a look at the NCAA tournament. The odds of picking a winning bracket are so low that Warren Buffet has offered a challenge. I have entered the tournament on WBLM and will enjoy following the tournament during the remainder of the month. If students want to enter that challenge with a parent online, the link will give you rules and access.
Let's chat about other fun news from Club Smith - please read the Slice of Life entries from our creative class. I've laughed out loud and read with great interest, the many entries. I too have recharged my writing by participating in the challenge. Effective communication through writing is a skill we need our entire life. For student who find typing a challenge, I've included a link here to with Common Sense Media's guide to the best keyboarding games for kids.
Our reading will inspire essays that each student will be developing in the next few days. From there our reading curriculum will be followed by a poetry unit and I hope to squeeze in both a historical fiction and a fantasy unit of study.
Our writing will focus on building our skills and honing in on a story to publish for our end of the year book. I will keep you posted on that as things develop. We may need to do a bit of fundraising if our sponsor from last year is unable to support the project.
Update March 1, 2018
Wow! Just like that, it's March. We begin the month by singing. On Friday, March 2, 2018, we will be singing at the 5th grade community meeting. Please attend if you can. I believe you can also stream via FB live.
We have a lot of happenings this month. Poetry will be read and written - look for fabulous writing from every student.
Fractions will continue to be our focus in math. Yippee! It's beginning to make sense to the children. While some have mastered this and will be doing more involved projects using fractions. I plan to set up Khan Academy sites for students to use both in and out of school
We will continue our Out of Eden project and dive into civics and understanding our personal family history.
Science is continuing with our engineering project. The great chair challenge.
Update Valentine's Week
Important Update: The field trip for Friday has been postponed until the Tuesday after vacation. The forecast called for rain so a postponement decision was made. A fun time will be planned for our 5th graders on Friday afternoon. Stay tuned.
Update February 5- 9th, 2018
Next week News Flash: Beauty and the Beast on Wednesday 2/14 at Thornton Academy will be followed by our Valentine's party. On Friday, our entire 5th grade will head outdoors to snow tube. I will be away on Thursday and Friday (I participated in summer work that earned me a little bonus of what are called voucher days - I will head out early to Florida). Our P.E. teacher, Mr. Gallant, will be escorting the students from our class on the field trip as well as our Americorp volunteer, Collay.
Now an update re: this week. Let's begin with the update on the newspaper. The color printer is not cooperating at the moment and we have been delayed putting our final printed copy together. Our digital copy is ready to post here on Monday or Tuesday of next week. Look for a new tab called ClubSmith News by Students of ClubSmith. We will organized sections and post a digital copy of our paper there and will update it from time to time as students continue writing journal articles.
We've finished our reading assessments - the students worked really well to show the gains they are making in reading. The reading they are doing inside school and at home has certainly boosted their abilities. Every child showed growth.
Fractions - We are still working to understand the concepts and rules for adding and subtracting fractions. I'm proud of how hard the students are working to understand this sometimes difficult concept.
We've begun to look at opinion and editorials and how to evaluate a good convincing essay from a personal point of view. Students will be working on writing essays about a topic of choice in the coming month.
That's it from ClubSmith!
Oh wait...I forgot the cardboard chair challenge is on. I've posted a few links on the science page to help students begin to think about design from an engineering standpoint.
Update: January 29 to February 2nd, 2018
We will continue our social studies exploration of the Silk Road. Students will connect history (exploration) to the current day using our Out of Eden Literacy night at CK Burns will be on Jan 30, 2018 - it will include book give aways and interactive sessions to highlight our reading, writing and word study programs.
Our class will travel to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute on Friday 2/2/18. This is a hands on learning experience where students learn about the ecosystems found within the Gulf of Maine and learn about the importance of protecting our water sources. Please check with your child to see the work they did - it can be found using the information sent home.
Update: Weeks of 1/16 to 1/26
With the holiday ,snow days and late starts we've really only had about a full week of classes in the last two weeks so I've consolidated an update here:
- We are finishing up division :) and moving on to fractions. The children have worked really hard to get those facts learned and all have progressed in their understanding of the concept of how to divide numbers. All students worked at their current level of ability, some doing extension activities and others perfecting skills that will ready them for our next unit. I've seen a lot of perseverance.
- Reading and writing has really been great. Students have learned to take notes, read texts and form ideas that they have shaped into a new article. Look for the ClubSmith News here next Friday.
- We will begin the cardboard chair challenge next week. This will be an exploration of science/engineering. We wanted to finish our social studies unit of study (Out of Eden Learn - global understanding of cultures) before we dive into this fun science curriculum
- Look for a flyer soon on the snowtubing trip that will take place on the last day before the Feb. break (2/16/18)
- Gulf of Maine trip will take place next Friday the 2nd of Feb. This is an excellent trip that ties together all we learned in Ecomuve and teaches us all about the fishing industry and the environment.
Update: Week of 1/8 to 1/12/18
Happy Second week of January. Our week has been fabulous. We are mastering the art of journalism and writing feature articles about topics of interest. Look for an edition of the ClubSmith Chronicles in a few weeks.
This unit ties in nicely with our unit of study where we focus on reading non-fiction. Students are learning to note take and read non fiction texts. We read a lot this week about Martin Luther King and his many contributions to the civil rights movement.
Our word study unit is launched - all students will have word study work for home learning on Tues/Thurs in the coming weeks.
In math, we are working in groups that match where we are while understanding the concept. Some students will be working on mastering facts, some have progressed nicely with one digit divisors for example, 899 divided by 7, others have begun to work on 2 digit divisors (899 divided by 71) and others have completely mastered division. Those students are working on extension activities.
Our science unit begins shortly - look for a lot of enthusiasm with the cardboard chair engineering project.
Look for updates soon on our student writing page and check back often (at least weekly) for updates.
The first snow day that fell on last Thursday 1/4/08 delayed the Thursday updates. The new year is off to a great start and I'm excited by the students enthusiasm. We have begun our units of study in journalism and reading in non-fiction. Students like the choice when given a topic to write about that ties into their non-fiction reading. We will compile our writing into a newsletter that will appear here electronically and also send home a printed copy.
Our focus in math is mastering multi-digit division. Knowing facts is absolutely necessary for efficiently dividing large numbers. Home learning my include math fact drills in the coming days and weeks.
We've wrapped up our study of an ecosystem and are moving onto an engineering design unit. The children are really excited about this.
Our socials studies units will also focus on responsible news reporting, identify fake news and looking critically and thoughtfully at the news online and in print. We will continue with part two of our Out of Eden unit.
Please use the link below to join our class on NEWSELA
newsela.com/join/#/524R5U
12/20/17
Look at our Poetry Page for some new writing by students. I'm incredibly proud of the writing being submitted this year. Some student work has been submitted and is still in the editing process - we will be updating this page weekly!
Update from the survey December 7, 2017- The website will contain all the links for sharing student work, reading and writing, a poetry page, science and social studies information and other topics as they come to be.
The overall response overwhelmingly was to keep the information in one place. I will get students to begin to create pages and submit work when it is ready to share with you all.
Many of you were interested in See Saw and the ability to use the app, however the website was a unanimous vote getter.
Club Smith Family Survey - November 2017
As part of my professional goals this year, I decided to design the class webpage. In addition to the web page, it was my plan to use a new application called See Saw to communicate with families.
In mulling things over, I decided to reach out to you to talk a bit about what you would find easiest to navigate and helpful as we try to communicate the learning in ClubSmith.
In reflection, I think the webpage could have separate pages for learning. As you know, we now have separate pages with home learning links and Club Smith News. We also used it to schedule parent conferences. I could add pages that give specific information re: Math (with links to good practice sites), Science, Social Studies, and Technology etc.
Or do you think you would like to explore See Saw, an application that would require you to down load an app and that app would be used for communication? I’ve got a link here or go to our web page and click on Club Smith news to easily access this link. Or you can google See Saw so that you can look at the video on how it is used.
I think there are pros and cons to both.
Please return this form sent home with your student responses to the following questions:
I would like to use the website for all communication Yes________ No_______
I would like to explore See Saw Yes__________ No ___________
I would like to receive paper copies of communication Yes_________ No__________
I have enough apps or do not use apps and am not interested in signing up Yes______
Use this link to understand the way atoms and molecules
We have begun our unit on Ecosystems. Click below to learn about energy transfers.
http://ecomuve.gse.harvard.edu/foodweb/foodweb.html
Here is the link for our learning quests:
- http://ecomuve.gse.harvard.edu/Pond_LQ.html
Look for an issue coming soon. Students will be working hard to get articles written and uploaded in the weeks ahead.