Week of January 27-31

It is incredibly hard to believe this week brings January to a close! On Friday, we will spend some time celebrating the 100th day of school with the Junior Kindergarten class. We hope you and your family will be able to come see the Middle School play, Annie, Jr., this weekend. Although we are excited to see the play this year, we have to admit we are even more excited to see next year’s play to include this current fifth grade class. There certainly is a lot of artistic, musical and theatrical talent within the class of 2027!

Mrs. Wimble has asked that we please remind all of our students that they need to wear appropriate athletic shoes and clothes on P.E. days (Monday & Wednesday for Mr. Barzditis homeroom, Wednesday & Friday for Mrs. McGehee’s homeroom). It is also important for all students with long hair to put their hair up. Thank you in advance for helping our students come to school prepared on all P.E. days.

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

Language Arts: As we’ve been gearing up towards our small-group discussions with our Spinelli Reading Circles, the class has been reviewing effective skills for answering discussion questions fully and utilizing evidence from the text. By use of a handy acronym (RACE – Restate the question in your answer; Answer the question; Cite evidence from the text; Explain), the students practiced this approach in small groups with the myth of “Theseus and the Minotaur,” which resulted in a demonstrably thorough and excitable large-group discussion.

In addition to the Spinelli small-group discussions, the students have been preparing for their first vocabulary quizzes, which are coming up on Friday. Many of these words are incredibly useful and applicable, not only because they occur in the novels they’re reading, but because of how the students will be able to use them in their verbal and written expression. These quizzes will occur every two weeks, meaning the students will be responsible for roughly 10-15 new words by the time each quiz rolls around.

Math: This week in math students have been practicing addition and subtraction of fractions, especially involving regrouping, simplifying, and renaming. They were challenged to explain in either words or models, the math behind a strategy with regrouping of mixed numbers with subtraction that was shared with me by one of their peers. Many students worked hard to prove the mathematical reasoning behind the “trick” which worked every time. This discussion even brought about negative rational numbers, and the relationship between addition and subtraction of negative numbers. Students are also focusing more on word problems involving fractions this week. As we head into next week, our fifth graders will need to rely on their previous understanding of unit fractions and whole number multiplication to begin developing their understanding of multiplication of fractions.

History: This week in History, we’ve been continuing along with our 50 States Presentations. As the songs and presentations have gone by, the students have also been jotting notes based on the interesting facts they’ve learned, such as a state’s official animal, bodies of water, and famous individuals from that state.

Next week, we’ll shift away from US Geography and dive headfirst into the Industrial Revolution. Before we can get there, though, we’re going to finish up this unit with a final US States quiz, which we mentioned in last week’s blog. This final quiz will be Friday, and though your students won’t be responsible for knowing the capitals, they will have to identify all of the fifty states on a map. We know many of them have been studying hard for this final assessment, so we’re excited to see them put their knowledge to the test.

Science: In science, we will still be working on our garden project, but we have also begun our unit on health and the human body. Students have already begun to learn about the systems within the human body, but soon they will know the main organs of each system, as well as how they interact to keep our bodies functioning at it’s best.

We hope that this blog is helpful in keeping you up to date on what is going on in each of our academic classes. Please know that we welcome you to contact us should you have any questions or concerns. We would be more than happy to meet with you to discuss our goals and objectives for this year.

Have a great week,

Kimberly & Tim

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *