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