Updates and announcements

We are off to a strong start this school year! I hope everyone’s weekend was restful.

Students will receive their graded work from the week every Friday in a “signed folder”. Students are not to open the folder until they get home and are able to go through it with a parent. Once this is done, the student and parent are supposed to sign the sheet on the inside of the folder and the student will turn the folder in at the beginning of the following week (usually Monday, sometimes Tuesdays).

Tutoring will begin next week. Tutoring will look a little different for fifth grade than it looked in fourth grade. The three lead teachers will share tutoring amongst the 90 students. Any student may attend any tutoring they need. We will reassess as the school year progresses and make changes as needed. Students must be picked up by 3:45 on Mondays and Tuesdays, and 2:45 on Wednesdays. Please do not enter the traffic line before 3:35 or 2:35, as it can congest the flow of traffic for students who are not in tutoring. If the line is backed up, the teacher will wait with the student past 3:45. The schedule is below:

Spalding/Grammar/Sentence Diagramming-Monday 3:05-3:40-Mrs. Lynch

Math-Tuesday 3:05-3:40-Ms. White

Math-Wednesday 2:05-2:40-Mr. Giammalva

Students get to start doing the morning announcements this week! Students will be chosen on a first come-first serve basis, and will not be able to go a second time until all the students in the class have been able to read the announcements. I must send the student downstairs by 7:42 at the latest, so students must be on time if they wish to participate. The announcement duty will rotate between the three classes by week. After this week, our next week for announcements will be the week of September 12^th.

Our week in learning

Students will learn about the idiom “Bite the hand that feeds you”.

Students will learn about the roots equus, caballus, and hippos 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 3 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 punctuation rules and review for a short quiz (Friday) on punctuation and capitalization rules.

In week 2, students will continue learning about the scientific method and how to apply it to their own experiments. On Monday, students will be introduced to experimental and control variables and their importance to an experiment. We will go through several “dry runs” of different experiments as a class as we prepare for hands on experiments in the coming weeks. On Friday, students will take a short quiz over what constitutes a good hypothesis and the point of an experimental variable and a control variable. Students should use their notebooks to help them study for this quiz. 

This week in history students will finish their first unit on world lakes. They will have a quiz on Tuesday on the location of the lakes of Eurasia. The Unit 1: World Lakes test will occur on Thursday (students were given a study guide on 8/8). There is a correction: study guides will be due on Tuesday, August 13th. students will have time to work on these in class. On Wednesdays going forward, we will be studying U.S. Geography, this week covering New England. On Friday, we will begin Unit 2: The Maya, Aztec, and Inca Civilizations.

In math, students will continue working on our unit on Whole Numbers, focusing on approximation, estimation, factors, multiples, prime factors, prime factorization, and multiplying by tens, hundreds, and thousands. 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.