Updates and announcements
I hope everyone had a wonderful
and relaxing weekend! I finished up a quilt top that I’ve been working on for a
while! I’m excited to start pinning and quilting it in the coming weeks.
Math groups start this week. We
had so much interest that I am putting out a blanket reminder for volunteers. Math
groups will take place on Wednesdays, 8:35-9:45 and parents will take a group
of students to help work through an assignment. If you are interested and able
to help this week, please email me. Updates for whether math groups are
happening will be in the math section of the blog every week.
Curriculum Night is this week!
I hope to see you all at this parent-only event on Wednesday, 8/28, 6:00-7:30.
This is one of my favorite days of the year where I get to teach you about what
we do in the classroom.
Our week in learning
Students will learn about the idiom “Count your
blessings”.
Students will learn about the roots grex, omnis,
amphi, and ambi 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.
Students will recite “The Eagle” on Wednesday,
8/23. Students will learn about “The Tyger” on Wednesday 8/23, and recite it on
Wednesday, 9/11.
In Literature, we will read through chapter 8 in
“Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, working on vocabulary and summarizing every
chapter. Students will also learn about flat, round, static, and dynamic
characters.
In Grammar, students will practice classifying and
diagramming sentences with 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 learn about Thomas Edison and his inventions. As a class, we will continue
our study of the scientific method by testing which type of tape is the
stickiest! We will use this experiment to help study how to make a materials
list and how to present data in a bar graph.
This week we will continue Unit
2: Maya, Aztec, and Inca Civilizations. Our focus will shift to the Aztec
civilization on Monday and Tuesday, including conversations about the city of
Tenochtitlan which later became Mexico City, and its ruler Montezuma II. On
Thursday and Friday, we will learn about the Inca civilization, including their
early engineering in roadwork, and its conquest by the Spanish. For U.S.
Geography on Wednesday, we will learn about the states in the South.
In
math, students will continue working on our unit on Whole Numbers, focusing on
order of operations, distributive property, and mental math. 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. 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). Math groups will start this Wednesday, 8/28, 8:35-9:45.
