Updates and announcements

I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend! I discovered a new love in the sweet cream pumpkin cold brew from Starbucks, worked on a large queen sized quilt for myself, cuddled my cats, and got materials for a kid’s quilt for a coworker.

We are starting to have students call home to inform parents of missing homework assignments. Please note (as it was stated in the procedures packet at the beginning of the year and Curriculum Night), parents are not expected to do anything regarding the call. The student is only informing parents that there is an assignment missing and this is NOT a call to have parents bring the assignment in to school. Students will call home if they have an assignment missing that was due the previous day.

Math groups are in full swing! More information is in the Math section down below. Please let me know if you are able to volunteer.

Our week in learning

Students will learn about the idiom “Eat crow”.

Students will learn about the roots eu, malus, ex, and archos 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 learned about “The Tyger” on Wednesday 8/23, and recite it on Wednesday, 9/11.

In Literature, we will read through chapter 10 in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, working on vocabulary and summarizing every chapter. Students will also work through discussion questions in groups. 

In Grammar, students will practice classifying and diagramming sentences with adjectives and adverbs, adding in prepositional phrases this week. There will be a grammar quiz on Friday, 9/6. There will be practice quizzes going home for homework. The questions on those are very similar to the test.

We are approaching the end of our unit on Scientific Inquiry. This week, students will review how to make a good hypothesis, how to correctly identify variables in an experiment  ,and how to draw conclusions like a scientist. Students will receive their study guides on Tuesday, September 3rd, and they will be due on Monday, September 8th. The scientific inquiry test will be on Thursday, September 12th. For this assessment, students will need to know major vocabulary terms and be able to correctly analyze a simple experiment to find the hypothesis, variables, and draw a correct conclusion.

This week in history we will finish Unit 2: The Maya, Aztec, and Inca Civilizations. Study guides are due on Thursday, when we will review the entire unit, and our test will be on Friday. For U.S. Geography on Wednesday, we will learn about the states in the Midwest. Students will be quizzed on the location of all the states in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South. This is a states’ location quiz over 23 states, and students should be proactive about studying for it – encourage them to get a blank map of the U.S. and fill in as much as they can, repeating this until they know all the states they will be quizzed on.

In math, students will continue working on our unit on Whole Numbers, focusing on word problems and bar models. We will work through a foldable with 8 steps on how to solve a word problem. 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 continue this Wednesday, 8/28, 8:35-9:45. Please let me know if you are able to attend and I’ll make sure to have enough keys.