Ahead of Schedule

Even with so many breaks in the past few weeks, we have been working very diligently and I am glad to say we are ahead of schedule when it comes to our year-long schedule. If we keep this up, we will be done with most of the curriculum before school ends. That means we will get to delve deeper into concepts that wouldn’t normally be touched on in 5th grade. That is awesome, so keep up the great work!

Reading is progressing very well. This week we read the nonfiction text Oceans, and focused on main idea and supporting details. As we talked about in class, there are often numerous main ideas and supporting details in a nonfiction text. However, as a good reader, we need to be able to pick out the most important ones. We will be reading Seeing Earth from Space, another nonfiction text, and we will continue those same skills. We will also take advantage of all the nonfiction text aids to review some of the concepts we hit on a few weeks ago.

Now that we are half way through the second quarter, I did want to mention that we are right on schedule when it comes to our reading minutes goal. We are hoping to get 100,000 minutes by the end of the year, and right now we are at 38,114 minutes. That is awesome! We have had a lot of students going above and beyond each week to get our total minutes up there, so keep up the great work! As for the number of books read, we are trying to get to 600 books by the end of the year. We need to keep reading 5th grade level books (I don’t count the lower ones) and try to meet our goal. We are currently at 202 books so far this year. That is pretty good, but now I want to see the students step it up a notch.

As for Writing, I read through all of the memoirs and I was quite happy with what I saw. The students put a good effort into elaboration and word choice (which were the main focus of the memoirs). We have spent the last week completing one more memoir. We don’t usually write two pieces in a unit, but I really want the students to make the next step when it comes to elaboration and word choice. After going over last week’s memoirs, I think the students have a good grasp on those two concepts and I want to take advantage of this opportunity, and give them a chance to incorporate what we have learned. We should be finished with them by early next week, and I am excited to see how they have progressed in such a short amount of time. When we are all done with the memoirs, we will present them to the class to incorporate some Speaking and Listening skills into the unit. Once we are all done presenting, then we will go into the unit on the ABC’s & D of Prompt Writing. This will help the students prepare for the writing portion of the ISAT.

In Math, we started unit 5 which deals with fractions. This is a very difficult concept and students really need to be on their A-game if we are going to accomplish what we need to. We spent this entire week reviewing fraction concepts that have been touched on in previous grades. After an initial assessment of where we are in regards to our understanding of fractions, I can tell that this unit is going to take some time. We really need to leave 5th grade with a firm grasp on fractions.

The real story of the week has been Science. Even though we have four days of it a week, we have had a blast in those four days! We are continuing our unit on Small Life by delving deeper into the parts of an animal and plant cell. We started the week by creating models of a factory and associating the things we would find in a factory to the parts of a plant cell. (Thanks to all the parents and students who brought in supplies for this project). The models are coming out quite nice and I am finding that the students have some wild imaginations, but I like it. However, after spending two days constructing our models, I received a special delivery that changed the plans for the week. I had called in for some live specimens of single-celled organisms (amoeba, euglena, & paramecium), a few weeks ago. I didn’t expect them to get here this quickly, but they did. Given that they don’t have a very long life expectancy, we had to drop what we were doing so we could scope them out a bit. Although the students had a little trouble locating these squirmy little guys under the microscope (they can be pretty quick and hard to follow) it was a very beneficial experience. We will talk a little more about these living organisms next week, and discuss how they are related to plant and animal cells.

We had another great week and we are moving right along in the year-long plans. We are ahead of schedule and I hope to keep the pace up so that we can get into some other cool stuff that we wouldn’t normally get into. Keep up the great work, have a good weekend (I will be back up in Wisconsin), and I will see you on Monday!

Celebrations!!!!!
TBA