Happy Wednesday! The impact of the rain all last week, coupled with this being the week before Winter Break, is taking a toll on all of us. Be sure to have your student get as much rest as possible…they will not want to miss our big event planned for Friday afternoon!

There are a few special items to note this week:

• This Friday our fifth-graders will be participating in a game of “Angry Cats” with the Middle School Tacocat teams. If you have not heard yet, Tacocat is a very special part of being a Middle School student here at FA. Please note the colors of your child’s team for Friday below. They should wear as much of their color as possible, comfortable clothes, and sneakers.
  • Red- Amelia, Ethan, Jack
  • Yellow- Kat, Vika, Will
  • Black- Chance, Elizabeth, David
  • White- Tina, Xavier, Hunter
  • Green- Claire, Ayaan, Scarlet
  • Blue- Arav, Olivia, Connor
  • Purple- Cabell, Finn, Isla
  • Orange- Savannah, Silas, Hayley
• Report cards and comments will be available for you to view via Veracross Friday afternoon. Please keep an eye out for an email from Mrs. Estes for details.
• Agendas: We are working on helping your child learn to use their agenda for more than just homework. This is an important skill because they will need to keep track of all of their assignments from several individual teachers next year. We encourage you to help them use their agendas for other outside events as well. So far, they should have added the due dates for their D.A.R.E. essays, as well as back-filled the days leading up to the due dates with reminders. Please know this is an essay that will be written during class and should not be done at home. Thank you!

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

Language Arts: This week, we’ve continued to practice our skills with utilizing evidence from source texts, moved onto the next chapters in our Spinelli novels, and prepared for our impending vocab quiz this Friday. For this quiz, the students should be studying the words they’ve defined between this week and last, and it will follow the same “complete-the-sentence” format as the previous quiz. Finally, depending on how the students progress by the end of the week, we plan on utilizing some of the new material from our Spinelli novels to reimagine their content as a “found poem” and small-group discussions about each of their processes.

Math: The understanding of a decimal as something beyond “cents in a dollar amount” is difficult. In fifth grade, students move beyond the hundredths position in our number system to the thousandths. It is mind-boggling that we can infinitely keep zooming in on our numbers to make them more and more precise. We are working on making sense of this throughout the week and will be returning to this when we come back from Winter Break. 

History: As the students have likely mentioned to you already, we soft-introduced our next project within History. As a way to cap off our Immigration unit, the students will be conducting an interview with a family relative to learn more about their history, their culture, and where they came from. This project won’t be due until after Winter Break and they’ll have plenty of time to work on it in class, but because the students will likely need help in contacting their (potentially distant) relatives (whether by phone, email, snail mail, Skype, in-person, etc.), we wanted to put it on our all of our radars now.  

Science: Students practiced counting their heart rates and also felt a little snippet of what it would be like to work like our cardiac muscles do every day. We will be finishing up our sketch notes and doing an online activity which will help students realize how much our circulatory system affects our entire bodies. Stay tuned…a new body system will be discussed after the break!

As always, 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 and a wonderful break!

Kimberly & Tim