Updates and announcements

Happy week 3! Our students are catching on to our classroom procedures beautifully. I hope everyone had a restful weekend.

Prime Factorization is a tough concept for fifth grade and usually takes a couple lessons for students to get the hang of it. We will be reteaching and re-quizzing this week on that concept.

Tutoring starts this week. Please wait until 3:35 on Monday and Tuesday, and 2:35 on Wednesday to get into the pickup line. This will help traffic run smoothly for students who are not in tutoring. Students must be picked up by 3:45 on Monday and Tuesday, and 2:45 on Wednesdays.

Grammar/Spalding: Monday-3:05-3:40

Math: Tuesday-3:05-3:40

Math: Wednesday-2:05-2:40

Curriculum Night is next week! I look forward to seeing you all at this parent-only event. I love getting the opportunity to share about our classroom and getting to teach math, grammar, and spalding lessons.

Our week in learning

Students will learn about the idiom “Chip on your shoulder”.

Students will learn about the roots porcus, ornis, and avis on Wednesday. Students will be quizzed over these roots next Wednesday, plus a surprise one from a previous week. They should expect a similar quiz every week over the previous week’s roots.

In Literature, we will read through chapter 6 in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, working on vocabulary and summarizing every chapter. Please send “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” in with your students this week. 

In Grammar, we will review diagramming subject nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. There will be a grammar test on Thursday, 8/29. There will be practice quizzes going home for homework. The questions on those are very similar to the test.

This week in science, students will continue their glider experiment as we dive deep into independent variables. Students will have a chance to assemble their own gliders in groups, and then test three different changes to see if they make their plane fly further. It is sure to be an exciting week! We will then practice calculating percent change to help analyze the results. Students will turn in their lab sheets for a grade. They will also take another short quiz on Friday to practice identifying independent and dependent variables.

This week in history we will continue studying Unit 2: The Maya, Inca, and Aztec Civilizations, focusing on the Mayan civilization. Discussion will include the major theories of what caused the Mayan disappearance. On Friday students will play a Mayan game, pok-ta-pok. Students will also begin a journal, imagining themselves to be part of these ancient civilizations on a near-daily basis. Our Wednesday lessons on U.S. Geography will this week be focused on the Mid-Atlantic region.

In math, students will continue working on our unit on Whole Numbers, focusing on dividing numbers by 10s, 100s, and 1000s, and take their unit test on Thursday, 8/22. We will begin another unit on Whole Numbers on Friday, starting with order of operations. When a “test b” (multiplication test) is assigned for homework, it contains questions very similar to a quiz the following day. We take a lot of low-stakes math quizzes in fifth grade. All math workbook assignments are half of every type of problem. We will begin math groups in a few weeks-after we get our feet on the ground. Please keep in mind that students may do test corrections on any math quiz for partial credit (fill in the blank sheets, not multiple choice homework sheets).