Weekly News Letter

Weekly News Letter

Week of 10/19-10/23

Mr. S.V’s Fifth Grade Class

Greetings! 

Apologies for such a late post. I honestly just kept forgetting! This week is a busy one, so I'll jump right into the activities after a few short reminders. 

While I do have snacks in the classroom, they are meant for students that are unable to bring their own for reasons that I'm sure we all understand. There is no shame in this. That said, I have many students who routinely forget to bring a snack that are not lacking in means to do so, by their own admission. It is a difficult thing to deny one student snack and then turn around and permit another to do so without bringing attention to finances, something that is not appropriate or fair to anyone. 

Additionally, while I have so far been lax regarding our dresscode, it is something that I must now insist we enforce. Regarding sweaters, pullovers, and other forms of warming clothes, they must adhere to the color and logo policy. That being Navy Blue, Light Blue, Gray, Black, or White, and a strict no logo policy.

Last Thing! At the bottom of this page is the QR code to sign up for the Battle of the Books. The deadline is the 23rd of October, THIS FRIDAY! I am so sorry for getting this to you so late. I hope that anyone who is interested can be signed up in time. 

This week's activities

This week we began our Second Unit of Amplify, Early American Civilizations, discussing the Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires. 

In Social Studies, we are taking our Unit Test on Wednesday 10/21. Students have been studying all week for it, and so long as their study guides are completely filled out (we did these as a class) they will recieve half points back on any missed questions. The entire class put in a lot of work to study carefully, and really impressed me with how dedicated they were to learning and succeeding on this test. 

With that, we are finished with our Social Studies units in my class, and on November 2nd my homeroom students will move to Ms. Avakian's room to learn about the Age of Exploration. I will have Ms. Grass' homeroom class, and later in the year we will rotate again and my homeroom class will go to Ms. Grass' room to learn about Native American history. 

Until November 2nd however, we will be dedicating the full hour usually split between Social Studies and Science to just Science. My hope is that next week we will have our Science Chapter 2 test, so look out for the study guide for that as it will likely be handed out on Thursday. 

What will come home

Math homework will be various worksheets to do with Order of Operations that we are learning in class.  

Social Studies homework will be a State Poster project that will be sent home after our test on Wednesday the 21st. The rubric for this project is very similar to the World Lakes one. They should use a piece of firm, white construction paper, not printer paper, so that they have plenty of space to work and neatly arrange the required information. Make sure they take their time doing this! It is, similar to last unit, a huge part of their grade for this. The due date says November 7th, but as that is a Saturday, the actual due date will be set for the 9th. I will NOT accept any thing turned in until at least the first week of November, so please ensure they do not rush or speed through it. 

What you can do

Support your child and celebrate the effort they put into studying for the test. I am extremely proud of the way that they excitedly turned to each other and began to quiz eachother, work together to create flash cards, and other sorts of collaborative study methods.

Otherwise, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me directly at zsolis-vitale@shpamn.org