All is Well

All is well in 5J! I hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend. It works out perfect that we just got done studying Christopher Columbus, and now we have the day off to celebrate his contributions. This has been another successful week and once again we accomplished a lot. In Reading we finished up Iditarod Dream while continuing to work on making inferences. We had a number of students get 100% on the test Friday, so good job everyone and keep it up. I also had a lot of students only a few points from 100%. To help get over that hump in the future, don’t forget I have links on the blog homepage that students can use to help them study for the test. We are actually ahead of schedule in Reading, so we will take the week off on reading a Harcourt story. Instead, we will be focusing on identifying figurative language and using similes, metaphors, and other techniques to spice up writing.

While we are on the topic of Writing, we will be completing our final drafts for our book reviews on The Twits. We spent all of last week going through the writing process for the reviews, and I think we are starting to get that down. I have read through all of the Parrot Perspectives and we have discussed the importance of the revision and editing stages. I am confident the students really focused on those stages last week, and I’m excited to read through those book reviews. Although we could not send anyone to the Cool Cat Press last week (because of OLSAT’s), I will be sending some this week, so keep working on those independent pieces.

In Math, we finished up our review of Unit 2 and we will be having our test on Tuesday. For those of you in my class, I hope you studied this weekend. Remember, you can always take home your class notes, SRB, and you should have the parent letter for each unit. You can use those if you ever need help studying or doing the homework. I think we worked really hard during Unit 2 and I am confident we are all ready for the test.

We are progressing at a similar rate in Social Studies. We finished up learning about Plymouth and Jamestown last week. We also started our research projects on the 13 colonies. Each student will work with a partner to do research, make a PowerPoint, and present what they learned to the class. I am hoping all the research can be done by Friday, and we will be ready to start creating our PowerPoints on Monday. That might be pushing it a little bit, but I guess we will have to see how things go.

This upcoming week will be a very short one, but I still have some big plans. We obviously have Monday off, but we also have a half day on Wednesday. We will continue our normal Wednesday schedule until we leave (so we will have Math). This means we really only have 3 days to focus on Reading, Writing, and Social Studies. However, I have high expectations for this class and I am confident we can still get a lot accomplished.

Celebrations!!!!!
100% on Spelling Test
-Lanie, Austin, Matthew R., Jack, Julia, Dominic, Avarie, Aimen, Brenna, Cooper, Max, Kara, Nick, Gabby, Hannah F, & Hannah C.

100% on Folktales From Asia
-Ally, Megan, Avarie, Nick, & Brenna

-Jack’s FB team beat an undefeated team last weekend.
-Julie, Megan, & Gabby had time trials for swimming.
-Victoria, Brenna, & Hannah F. completed all levels on Otter Creek Multiplication
-Matthew R. read over 300 minutes in a week.