Keep it Up!

Well I just arrived in Iowa for the wrestling season-opener, and what better way to spend the night before than preparing for another productive week of school. Even though we have a short week coming up, I expect to get a lot accomplished. The past week has been very productive, and I expect to keep it up next week.

In Reading, we finished Everglades in the Harcourt Series. We will continue next week with Summer of Fire. We spent our time focusing on visualization and now we will work on the characteristics of nonfiction texts. There are numerous components of nonfiction that are critical to understand. As time goes on, nonfiction texts will play a larger role in student learning, and if you have a good grasp on the components of nonfiction, you will experience much more success.

Writing has been progressing as expected as well. We worked on our Memoirs last week and we will continue to do so next week. Revising has been the main point of emphasis and we are now moving on to editing and publishing. However, as I have mentioned numerous times, revising is the most important step in the writing process, and I expect to see more changes being made throughout the entire process.

Now that we have completed our Social Studies presentations on the 13 colonies (which were awesome by the way), we have moved onto our Small Life unit in Science. We spent all last week learning about microscopes and lenses. Next week will continue working with the microscopes and take a look into cells and their components. If everything goes as planned, we might even get a chance to observe the cells of an onion! This is exciting stuff!

Outside of the classroom, next week has a number of things that I would like to highlight. First and foremost, parent teacher conferences are scheduled for Tuesday. As I mentioned last week, I would like the students to come to the conferences with their parents. In 5th grade, students take a more active role in their education and need to be responsible for their performance. Therefore, it is good for students to hear anything being said at the conferences, and even participate in the discussion whenever possible. Being that conferences are all day Tuesday, there will not be any school. We are also off Wednesday due to Veterans’ Day.

Although I’m sure the 5J students have made plans to stay in all day Wednesday studying, reading, and preparing for Thursday, I wanted to invite everyone to our first home wrestling meet. As many of you may know, Brooks has a partnership with North Central College. Through this partnership, NCC sends a number of education majors to Brooks for observation hours. As a way to give back, NCC coordinates a variety of events to bond the North Central and Brooks communities. Being that I am on the coaching staff of NCC’s wrestling team, it offers a perfect opportunity for this type of event. Kelli Diaz, and administrator in the NCC Education Department, has created flyers that were sent home last week. The meet is against the University of Chicago and it should make for an exciting night. If you are at all interested, I would love to see you all there!

I hope everyone has a great weekend. I look forward to the short, yet fast-paced week coming up. With two days off, parent teacher conferences, and a wrestling meet, next week should be another good one.

CELEBRATIONS!!!
-100% on Unit 11 Spelling Test
Avarie, Matthew R., Landon, Arushi, Hannah C., Hannah F., Dominic, Megan, & Kara
-The class read over 3000 minutes last week (the most so far this year)!
-Lanie & Nathan completed Otter Creek Multiplication!