Welcome to the best 5th grade class!

First and foremost, thank you for giving me the opportunity to teach your child and be apart of their life. I do my best to promote a family atmosphere within my classroom and I can promise you that I will always put your child's needs first and will do whatever I can to help them succeed both in this classroom and beyond. With that said, I also need your help in making sure that this is the best year of your child's academic career and we make the most of our time together. We only get 180 days together and we need to make sure that each second counts. If you ever need to contact me, feel free to call the office, write in the agenda, or e-mail me at, clawyer@zanesville.k12.oh.us.

Now, let's get to work!

Highlights of Mr. Lawyer's Language Arts Class

50 book challenge

With a new year upon us, once again our push is to get our students reading both in and outside of the classroom. Research has proven that the more a student reads and writes the better they will get at those two things. (The old adage: “Practice Makes Perfect” couldn’t be more true) So I will be trying something a little different based on the research I have done myself on best practices for reading.

In my classes I will be challenging each student to read 50 books this year. This will be my 5th year doing the 50 book challenge and I have been blown away by the amazing results that it has produced in my students. I know that may sound like a lot of work for our students, but we must set our expectations high for the ones we care about and help them achieve this goal. Students will be able to pick books based on what they want to read as they will be more inclined to read something that is of interest to them. Our goal is to create avid, life-long readers. Class time will be devoted to independent reading and responding to what they are reading through discussion or writing about their books in their weekly letters that they write to me.

Accelerated Reader

Accelerated Reader is great tool that the 5th grade uses to push and reward students for meeting high expectations. The Accelerated Reader program (AR) is a program in which students take tests on books that they have read and receive an amount of points on the test based on how many questions they got right and the difficulty of the book. Point goals are set by the teacher based on the reading level of the individual student. This means that EACH STUDENT is capable of meeting the goal that is designed specifically for them! In addition, students who meet their goals are treated to a pizza and pop reward party during lunch at the end of each quarter.

Nightly Reading Logs

We are also going to make sure our students are reading at home with the use of reading logs. The books will be checked out to the students from the classroom or school library and students will bring home a book and a reading log in a Ziploc baggie each night. Students are to read for AT LEAST 20 minutes and respond to a particular teacher chosen question on the reading log based on what skill we are working on at the time in class. I will challenge the students to read even longer than 20 minutes and we will have competitions and chart how many minutes we read each night.

Be sure to check out some of the pages to honor and remember classes of years past!