We are excited to see all of the Halloween costumes tomorrow! Our annual Halloween parade will be at 9 a.m., but the remainder of the day will be fairly normal. We have reminded our students of the following guidelines throughout this week:

• Costumes should not be too scary and cannot include any weapons.
• Students are able to wear masks for the parade and at recess, but other than that they must remove any masks and/or hoods.
• Halloween candy should not be brought to school. We did say they could bring a piece to enjoy as part of their dessert at lunch. Any other excessive candy will be donated to the third grade’s Treats for Troops candy drive (see below). We encouraged students to bring in any of the candy they do not like to donate to the cause!

Treat our troops to a sweet treat! The third grade is partnering with Soldiers’ Angels Treats for Troops Program to ship donated candy to deployed service members around the world. Please drop off any candy (including extra Halloween candy!) to a third grade classroom, the Falcon’s Nest, the LS front desk, or with Mrs. Walsh in the US. We are collecting until November 5^th.

Please do not forget to click on “Links and Resources” at the top of this page. Here you will find the folder which has all of the photos we take throughout the year. Check back often, as we will continue to upload photos all year!

Here’s what is going on in our classes this week:

Reading: This week, the students will be completing Part 1 of Holes, which will require a bit more reading than we’ve done in the previous weeks. That said, I’m confident the students will be more than capable of handling the volume and turning their experiences into various creative products.

By the end of the week, the students will have to choose three of seven possible assignment prompts to respond to, ranging from rewriting a scene/chapter from another character’s perspective to visualizing and articulating similarities between our main antagonist, The Warden, and other characters they’ve encountered in other texts.

As the students are reading and working independently, I’ll be facilitating small group discussions to help gauge comprehension of the main narrative and our handling of the literary devices relevant to our work with Holes, primarily theme, characterization, and symbolism. The work we do this week will culminate and help prepare the students for a Part 1 quiz early next week.

History: We’re so glad that so many of you were able to join us for a great field trip this past Friday. With their Landmark Essays and Presentations in the rear view, the final part of their projects will be to complete a short reflective essay outlining various aspects of their experience preparing for and participating in the trip.

This is a much shorter, low-stakes form of writing than their research essays, so expect your student to have this completed by the end of the week. That said, the skills and benefits of reflective writing should not be understated–allowing the students to step back, think about their subjective experiences, and articulate those thoughts into ways to improve or guide their future work will be paramount as we continue on through the year.

Math: While some students are still working on long division, overall we are really focusing on problem solving this week. Word problems always tend to be a tricky area for many students. Of course it is important for students to be able to compute efficiently and accurately, but it is crucial they are able to do this beyond “naked math problems” (as one of my former college professors called them). The world is made of problems full of curve balls that take a lot of thinking to navigate. It is a mission of mine to help every student become a flexible thinker, capable of tackling whatever problem life throws at them- mathematically or otherwise.

Science: With the incredible landmark field trip behind us, we have finally begun our first science unit! We are diving a little deeper than students have before into the scientific method. We will quickly review the six steps of the scientific process, and then move on to writing a testable question and hypothesis. Friday we are looking forward to our first lab! Students will put their learning to the test as they investigating the effect of activity on their heart rates.

Have a great rest of the week and weekend! Don’t forget to turn your clocks back Saturday night!

Kimberly & Tim

Field trip week is finally here! We are all super excited to hear everyone present their research as we check out the sites of Washington D.C. As of right now, we have three forms that need to be returned, and just three seats left on the bus. If you have already returned your form and said you would like to ride the bus, we have a seat for you! Please note, each student who returned a form so far has had only one parent listed as coming with us, so if there are two parents planning to join us, we may need to make arrangements to meet you in D.C. If this is the case, please email us ASAP.

Click here to see the presentation order as well as estimated walking times. Since we are a large group, we will need to stay focused and walk at a reasonable pace to ensure that we hit each location.

Field Trip Reminders:

• In order to have enough time, we need everyone in the classroom at 8:15 a.m.
• The bus will leave FA promptly at 8:30 a.m., leave D.C. at 2 p.m., and will return to campus before 3:30 p.m. for carpool.
• Your child is responsible for his or her belongings and should bring a bag to carry their lunch, water, and snacks.
• Students may not have any electronics.
• Check the weather, dress in layers, and wear extremely comfortable shoes.
• Please pack a healthy lunch so you and your child are energized for the second half of the tour. We will picnic in Pershing Park.

Here is what is going on in our classes this week:

Reading: This week, we’re continuing on with Holes. The students had a riveting discussion today, specifically on the side story of Elya Yelnats and Madame Zeroni, which segued into our early work with symbolism. Collectively, we discussed the multiple meanings that Elya’s pig is essentially charged with as practice for when, on their own, students will end up identifying and deciphering other symbols in the larger work.

History: We are working on the finishing touches of our Landmark Research Project. At this point, I feel confident in saying that any and all parents who join us this Friday will be impressed with the work and devotion each of our students have put into this project. We cannot wait to see many of you on Friday!

Math: We are continuing our work with division this week. Do you remember when we learned long division and you (or maybe it was just me?) had that separate piece of paper that you did a bunch of different multiplication problems on to see how many times ____ went into ____? The partial quotient method removes the need for doing all that side work! Students use flexible thinking, compatible numbers, and facts they can easily recall to subtract groups in parts. This is a huge help not only in that it shows an understanding of division (repeated subtraction of groups), but it really helps those who do not yet have all the multiplication facts on automatic recall. If you have not seen partial quotients yet, I encourage you to ask your child to show this method to you. Also this week, we are continuing our discussion of the two types of division problems; fair-share division and measurement (or quotative) division. In general, we tend to think of division as the fair-share type of problems (dividing a set number of items equally up into a set number of groups). Unfortunately, students are typically not as familiar with measurement division (dividing the items into groups with a set number in each, thus finding how many groups can be made). This terminology is not necessarily important, but it IS important to realize not all division problems fit into the same mold. This will become especially important as we move to dividing decimals and fractions. Dealing with numbers beyond whole numbers are an exciting challenge ahead, so this is a great time to reprogram students’ minds about how the larger number is not always divided by the smaller number. Gasp! I cannot wait. 🙂

WOW! What a wild and wonderful couple of weeks it has been in Fifth Grade!

During Spirit Week, our Kindness Boomerang was finally completed and shared with the Lower School at our Community Meeting. Click HERE to watch this awesome video. Many of the third grade students felt such an impact from the video that they wrote letters to our fifth grade students. It was wonderful to hear the third grade students share their letters with our fifth graders last week.

That same afternoon,  we enjoyed our first pep rally of the year and to top it off, several of our students “worked” the Fifth Grade Tailgate BBQ during the homecoming games. The fifth grade students worked so hard and earned just under $750. Incredible! We are looking forward to using some of those funds to treat our students to a special breakfast during our overnight field trip. Our class will also brainstorm some ideas of how we can use the rest of the money to do something special for our school and/or community.

Please keep an eye out for the information coming home this week about our Landmark Field Trip next Friday, October 25. We hope you will be able to join us!

We truly enjoyed getting to talk with so many of you during our parent conferences last week. As always, please let us know if there is anything we can do to support your child as they learn and grow throughout fifth grade.

Here is what has been going on in our academic classrooms:

Reading: Last week, we really dug (ha) into Holes and worked with the first five chapters in a number of ways. The students had four different approaches to choose from, including character portraits, letters to home from the perspective of Stanley (our main character), and summary slideshows. The week culminated in a comprehensive quiz, in which the students did really well!

History: With much of our research coming to an end, we’ve now turned our efforts towards organizing our information and writing the first draft of their Landmark essay. Over this week, we’ll continue working towards a final draft, as well as individually conference with Mr. Barzditis to address any questions or concerns.

Math: In preparation for our BBQ sales, we learned a lot about creating a business plan and running a business. Our students calculated all of the final expenses, revenue, and overall profit for the project. We also practiced multi-digit multiplication, starting with accurate, but inefficient methods (partial products and the area model) which better show the reasoning behind the traditional algorithm. After building this solid understanding, we transitioned to more efficient strategies, such as the traditional or lattice methods. This week we are continuing in this same fashion with division. We will build conceptual understanding with less efficient strategies before moving to more efficient traditional algorithms. Please allow your child to go through this process rather than skipping to “the way we learned it”. Building this solid foundation will benefit them greatly later in the year when we head into decimals and fractions.

We hope everyone had a fantastic fall break. Time is going so fast!

Enjoy the short week,

Kimberly & Tim