Week of January 9th-January 13th

Upcoming Dates:
FRIDAY, JAN. 13 ........PTO BINGO NIGHT 7:00-8:30 in the MS East Gym
FRIDAY JAN. 13..........RELEASE TIME
MONDAY JAN 16:......MARSHALL MUSIC comes to visit 5th grade
TUESDAY JAN 17.......5th GRADE SPELLING BEE in Hamilton El cafeteria
FRIDAY, JAN. 20 ....... PTO POPCORN
MONDAY, JAN. 23..... PTO MEETING – 7PM
FRIDAY, JAN. 27 ........NO SCHOOL



The Spelling Bee is at 2:15 in the cafeteria Tuesday, January 17th.





Our school psychologist has been coming in each week for the past four weeks to give 20 minute lessons focusing on positive behaviors, behavior choices and appropriate peer interactions. She will continue to come in over the next few weeks. These discussions have been good talking points as a class as well as when students have issues arise during the week. 


MATH:
We have been reviewing concepts in our fractions unit. We began working in the Chapter 8 fraction operations unit learning about the Least Common Multiple, adding and subtracting fractions with like and unlike denominators. We have practiced these concepts by working problems on paper and looking at what the concepts look like in pictures using drawings and computer games and lessons.
We will do the Ch. 7 study guide Monday and take the test Wednesday over Chapter 7.

READING:
We worked in nonfiction guided reading groups this week. We practiced determining importance, main idea/detail, vocabulary meanings in context, and text features. Students will begin book clubs, reading chapter books next week.


WRITING:
Our next project is writing newspaper articles for a class newspaper we will post on my fusion page.
 Skills we worked on this week in order to prepare for this piece: 
Alliteration and using it in headlines, Quotation marks in dialogue and writing dialogue in the correct format, fact versus opinion, and parts of a news story. We read and discussed example news stories and searched articles for the skills we learned and how they were applied in the article. Students are choosing topics and will begin writing next week.


SPELLING:
Our skill this week has been the 'ou/ow' sound in "house", 'ow' in "snow", and the "toughies" that don't fit in this category such as your, bought, and though.


SCIENCE:
We worked on the study guide for a quiz for lessons 5-9. We have discussed this as a class and students have been spending time in class studying for Friday's quiz. We also began our lessons on simple machines focusing on levers. We watched a couple video clips of Rube Goldberg set-ups as they feature various types of simple machines and are fun to watch!


Have a wonderful weekend enjoying the snow!