WEEK OF APRIL 23RD - APRIL 26TH

DATES:

April 27............................... No School
May 1...................................Moments with Mom
May 3 ................................. Charlton Park Field Trip
May 11....................................Track and Field Day
Please don't forget to turn in your $6 for Charleton Park and the $7 for Track and Field Day shirts if you haven't done so!


Charlton park Field Trip: A reminder note will be sent home next Tuesday.
   

Poetry Brunch: No pictures because I only took video! I will be emailing students their videos and they will put them on their web pages.

Math:
We have been working i Chapter 5 on graphing. Students began doing their own surveys by writing a question, polling others, and then putting the information into a data table. They will use their data to create a graph online next week. We will also begin learning about mean, mode, range and median.
We have been doing quite a lot of review along with our current units.
HW: Students do have math homework due on Monday.


Reading: We completed A Long Way from Chicago on Thursday. Students have a bit of homework for this that is due on Monday. We will be starting Book Clubs on Monday. Students had some options to choose from for novels.

Writing:  
  We bean Pourquoi or "why stories" this week. Students will have options as to how they want to present their final drafts of this later.

Science:  
We're all parents to crabs and tree frogs! We will be observing our animals as part of our systems unit. Students will also be responsible for the care of them each day!
 
Spelling:
This week's skill was synonyms homophones. Next week's skill is double letters in words.

WEEK OF APRIL 16th - 19th

DATES:

April 27............................... No School
May 1...................................Moments with Mom
May 3 ................................. Charlton Park Field Trip


The High School band and choir came Friday to sing and play for 5th graders and give them an idea of what it is all about.



Charlton park Field Trip: Please read the note about this field trip that was sent home today.
   
Puppets:   The puppets the students did for Mrs. Longshore's Art class look great! They read biographies and wrote a fake Facebook page to go with their puppets. These are located in the library if you are in and want to see them.


Poetry Brunch: The students practiced their presentations for Mr. Rienstra's class on Thursday in preparation for the Brunch. They are very excited and have worked hard. Public speaking is a real world skill. Students will do quite a bit of presenting to the class in middle school as well. I will have some pictures on the blog later.


Math:
Several students took the Chapter 10 test, "Measuring Solids" on Thursday. The rest of us are continuing to review converting measurements, a concept we also worked with in Chapter 9. The test will be Tuesday for the rest of the class. We will begin our unit covering graphs next week.

Reading: We continue with A Long Way from Chicago on Tuesday. We are discussing point of view and practicing inferencing and vocabulary skills. We are also working on determining importance and writing a summary. We'll continue next week and write a short cause and effect piece.

Writing:  
  Students have completed their poetry writing. We worked on metaphor, main idea, and parts of speech poems as well as alliteration and biography poems. I am hoping to have students create a digital scrapbook of their poems to put on their web pages at some point.

Science:   Classification continued this week. We then came to a consensus about what the basic needs for survival are: air, water, food, and shelter. We discussed behavioral and physical characteristics and how these characteristics help animals meet their basic survival needs.
 
Spelling:
This week's skill was synonyms. Next week's skill is homophones

Enjoy the weekend!

1.	picture
2.	sand
3.	friends
4.	temperature
5.	eighties
6.	There's
7.	ocean
8.	toward
9.	let's
10.	modern
11.	beautiful
12.	figure
13.	although
14.	probably
15.	suppose
16.	practice
17.	lets
18.	wrong
19.	field
20.	especially
21.	pair
22.	either
23.	explain
24.	ahead
25.	history
26.	across

WEEK OF APRIL 9 - 13

DATES:


Puppets due for Art...........  April 18 

Poetry Brunch ...................  April 20 at 9:40
Release Time ...................... April 20  
April 27............................... No School
May 3 ................................. Charleton Park Field Trip
    I will send a note about the trip next week again. 


Puppets:   I am getting material for this weekend for students who asked, so I am going to have the puppets due Wednesday the 18th instead of the 16th so they can finish. Puppets will be displayed in the library with the Facebook Biography Page that students created.

Please don't forget that my fusion page has several math sites and some video tutorials for your child if they need practice. Your child is aware of this and we have gone into it many times to review what is there. Go to the Hamilton website, choose "Hamilton Elementary", "classes" (on the left),
then my name on the right under "5th grade".


Math:
This week we began our second measurement unit. We used cubes to build rectangular prisms and applied the formula for finding volume and related this to our previous lessons about area. We looked at a variety of containers in order to assist us in thinking/learning about converting customary and metric units of capacity. Learning about converting customary units of weight was also part of our week.
The test will be next Thursday.


Reading: We began A Long Way from Chicago on Tuesday. Monday students viewed and discussed video clips about the Dust Bowl and a power point presentation about the 1930's/Depression as background for the book. The novel centers around siblings that travel from Chicago to visit their Grandma Dowdel in her small town home and about their experiences with her. The kids love this story.

Writing:  
We began a poetry unit this week as the note I sent home mentioned. The students are focusing on using descriptive, precise language and imagery to create a picture in the reader's mind. They are writing a variety poems. The students are looking forward to presenting one of their original poems  as well as a work by a published author. Thanks to those of you who are willing to donate food items for the Poetry Brunch! I will contact you on  Monday about what item to bring.  

Spelling:
This week's skill was the sound /j/ as in jar and how this can be spelled 3 ways using  g, j, or dg. Next week's skill will be synonyms.

Science:   Classification has been the focus this week. We discussed why scientists classify organisms and how we use classification in our daily lives. Students used an interactive site to learn about how and why animals are classified as mammals, reptiles, amphibians, etc. and then played some games that required them to apply this knowledge. Then students classified the animal cards into proper categories with their new information.

  Students are looking forward to having tree frogs and hermit crabs in the classroom as part of this unit. 

Enjoy your weekend!!