Thank you to all who came our for our Back to School Night on Thursday! If you were not able to attend, please know we sent a packet of all the handouts home with your child Friday.
Be sure to check the Reminders and Upcoming Events tabs to the right. There is a link to sign up for Parent Conferences under Upcoming Events. We hope to meet with each and every one of you!
You should be receiving a weekly email called the FA Weekly. This is a great way to find out what is going on around campus. Also, there are links to various ways to help out with the Parent Faculty Association. We are so thankful for all the work this great group does for our school!
This week in fifth grade we have continued our kindness theme, as we worked on the class Kindness Boomerang. Please be sure to ask your child about this creative project. In our core classes we worked on the following this week:
Reading: As we mentioned in our Back-to-School night presentation, being able to discuss and express ideas about a work of literature is going to be a crucial part of our studies this year. Using Langston Hughes’ seminal short story, “Thank You Ma’am,” we defined the difference between round and flat characters, collectively summarized the story’s narrative structure, and used evidence from the text to show how the main character, Roger, develops over the course of the tale. Finally, we concluded with a short quiz based on the text and our week-long discussion. Though this quiz was merely practice, your student can expect the quizzes that follow to be quite similar.
History: This week, we continued preparing our research skills and our abilities to recognize credible and non-credible resources. Though many students have done research projects in the past, being able to quickly and effectively identify trustworthy online sources of information will be vital, not only for their Landmark Projects, but especially as they transition into middle school. We’re aiming to start out next week by practicing some effective note-taking skills so that they’ll be more than ready to start digging into their Landmarks!
Math: I feel confident I am not alone in saying that solving word problems was an area of difficulty for me as a student in elementary school math. I was taught to memorize certain words to equate to specific mathematical operations. When one of those key words was not in the problem, or there were several key words within one problem, I was lost. One of the goals of fifth grade math is to truly understand problem solving rather than memorizing steps. During our daily word problems we are using the three read strategy:
- Read just to grasp an idea of what the problem is talking about in general.
- Read the problem paying attention to important information, making annotations if needed.
- The goal of the final read is to come up with a plan and solve the problem itself.
I have also stressed to the students that the number is only part of the answer, so it is important to answer word problems with a complete sentence. We will continue our practice of solving various word problems throughout the year. This past week we dove into prime and composite numbers, factors, and multiples. We will continue to practice identifying relationships between whole numbers next week as well.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Kimberly & Tim