Heritage 2013

Thank you to everyone for taking the time to join us for our Heritage Celebration on November 22, 2013.  It was a great success.  I was very proud of each student and how hard they worked to develop their research for their presentations.  

Newsletter

Wow, it is already November and we have been so very busy!  We are getting into a routine and continue to work on developing good work habits.  Please check your child's assignment pad and encourage them to utilize the assignment pad, homework folder and binder to keep themselves organized.  In addition students may use the Google calendar (found in the HW and Assignments tab) to help them keep track of their assignments.  

Thank you for supporting our community service project: Operation Gratitude.  We were able to collect almost two full paper boxes of candy to send to our troops overseas.  We are grateful to The Sports & Spinal Wellness Center for organizing the collection.  The Sports & Spinal Wellness Center was able to collect over a 100 pounds of candy! We were entered into a raffle because of our participation in the collection and we won a $50.00 gift card to Toys-r-Us.  We are thinking of buying some games to add to our word study activities.  

As you know, we will be going to the Bronx Zoo for our 5th grade field trip on Friday June 6th. Click on the icon below to check out the website and see all the amazing things we will be able to do at the Zoo.

We are starting our fundraising for this field trip today!  Students should have come home with a packet of information about our fundraiser.  We will be selling gift cards to Hoffman's car wash.  Our fundraiser will run from today, Monday November 18th, through Friday, December 6th, car wash tickets will be sent home during the week of December 9th in time for your holiday gift giving.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at school or send an e-mail.  

Each student read an independent book of their choice and then developed a book advertisement.  The goal of this project was for students to utilize our Summary 5 Question strategy to create a summary that included specific details from the text to support their thinking. In addition to a summary students had to include a recommendation persuading other students to read their book.  They had to create a poster that was eye-catching and would attract the attention of the reader.  This was done by including a scene or illustration from the story.  Then students presented their book advertisement to the class and were graded using the rubric below.  

*Click on icon below to open Book Advertisement Rubric.

When you visit school please take the opportunity to view the book advertisement projects displayed in the 5th grade hallway.

*Please encourage your child to use the Summary 5 Question strategy in their Homework reading log. 

Summary 5 Questions

Who?  Who is the main character?  Who are the other important characters?

Wants what?  The main character has to want something to make the story interesting.  What does the main character want in the story?

But?  But what happens?  What gets in the way of the character getting what she or he wants?  This is the problem of the story.  It must eventually be resolved.

So?  So what does the character do to try to solve the problem?  What works for the character?  What doesn’t?

Then?  And then what happens?  How is the problem solved?  How does the story end?

During Read Aloud we are currently reading an amazing book called Gossamer by Lois Lowry.  This book is written from serveral different character perspectives.  It is a story that goes back and forth between the real world and a dream giving world.  We are learning about how characters change over the course of a story and our goal is to think deeply about character motives.  In Reader's Workshop, we are reading a new book called The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate.  It is a phenomial story told from the perspective of a gorilla.  We are focusing our study on making inferences.  We've had some discussions about what a character does and what they might be feeling or thinking that isn't stated specifically in the text. It is an engaging story that makes you think more deeply about the treatment of animals. The main character Ivan says very little so the reader has to "read between the lines" to fully understand what he is trying to say.  We are utlizing a new strategy of listing the text and then writing what we think the character is trying to convey.  Please click on the book icon below to see a format for our Deep Thinking Stop-n-Jots.  Please encourage your child to utlize this strategy for their homework reading log.  

In Writer's Workshop we wrote "Edge of your Seat"  personal narratives.  We read the mentor text, Shortcut by Donald Crews and learned that an edge of your seat personal narrative is short, suspenseful and has strong emotions   We discussed foreshadowing and how to create tension in our writing to make it engaging to the reader.

We generated lists of strong emotions and feelings in our Writer's Notebooks.  Then we chose some of those emotions and wrote about times when we felt those emotions.  Many students wrote about times they were scared or anxious to do something, like ride a roller coaster.  Their stories were engaging and exciting.
We are also in the process of working on ways to improve our writer's notebook entries.  Many students are doing a great job of coming up with ideas for their entries.  Now they need to focus on ways to stretch their writing by adding more details to enhance their thinking.  Please encourage your child to make sure that they make more of an effort to use the writer's notebook rubric where they can find personal goals to improve their entries.

In Math we have finished working on division in Unit 2 of our Go Math program.  We have learned several different ways to to divide, including long division, dividing using base-ten blocks, and partial quotients.  With long division we have focused on an acronym: DMSB which means Dirty Monkeys Smell Bad.  Which breaks down the steps of long division as Divide, Multiply, Subtract and Bring down.   We are also encouraging students to use a sheet of lined paper (flipped sideways) so they can use the lines to create columns to keep their work organized and neat.  If they do this, then they will make fewer careless errors.  

We are also working on our test taking skills each week with the math quiz.  Students should continue to double check all of their work to make sure they are correct.  We learned to multiply the quotient by the divisor to check our division problems.  This takes time and often students are rushing and will not take the extra step to check their work.  I continue to insist to students how important it is that they get their work correct not just completed. 

We are currently working on Unit 3 of our Go Math program which focuses on decimals.  We  learned how to identify place value to the thousandths.  We also have reviewed how to compare decimals and order them from least to greatest.  Please encourage your child to utilize the strategies we are using in class, rewrite the decimals lining up the decimal points and then compare each place value.  Often they like to do this quickly and just look at the numbers but not truly identify the place values to make comparisons.  We reviewed rounding of decimal numbers and discussed the rule of "5 or more add one more" and if it is less than five, we leave it alone.  We focused on adding and subtracting decimals.  Although, this seems like an easy task, often students make careless errors in basic addition and subtraction. Please remind them to be thoughtful and check their work for mistakes.

Heritage Project

We are so excited to start our Heritage project and can't wait to have you join us for the Heritage Celebration on Friday November 22 at 8:30.  Students were given ample time in class to gather information in their research packets. Now that they are done with the research they can begin drafting their ideas for the poster boards using the Heritage Draft sheets. Once they are done with their Heritage Draft sheets they can submit them to me for approval. All Heritage Draft sheets are due by Monday November 4th along with the Sketch of their Poster boards. Since we have finished our in class research for the project we expect that students will now begin the independent portion of this project at home for homework each night. Remember the Poster board and speech are due on Wednesday November 20th.  Please click on the links below to access important documents for this project.

           

Heritage Project Introduction & Requirements

Heritage Plan Calendar

Heritage Speech Checklist

Poster Board Checklist

Newsletter

Hello!
Thank you for coming to Open House.  I enjoyed getting to meet each of you and look forward to a fabulous year!  Below you will find some information about what we've been working on so far this year.  If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Important Dates:
Schwest:  Wednesday October 9th at 1:15
Go Home Early Drill:  Friday October 11th
No School: Columbus Day:  Monday October 14th
Parent Teacher Conferences:  Tuesday October 29th Dismissal 11:30

We have been working hard in Social Studies and began our unit on Canada with a review of geography.  It is important that your child understand the world and the geographic location of the country we are studying before we can dive into more in-depth information. 

We also began our study of Canada with a geography activity locating the provinces and territories.  Your child took a quiz on the location of those provinces, territories, major bodies or water and neighboring countries.  

We have been reading a True Book about Canada which gives a basic overview of the entire country.  As we read, students are highlighting important information and then writing down the key ideas.  They have taken a quiz on that information.  

We will continue to read more in-depth about Canada and utilize a new strategy called Golden Lines to pull out key ideas from the text.   We will learn how to pull out important information and focus on the key ideas we can learn about each province and territory.  Please check your child's Assignment pad for future quiz dates on the provinces and territories.

In Writer's Workshop we have continued to develop strategies to create writer's notebook entries.  We discussed unforgettable stories and how what is memorable to one person might be less so for another.   We are all individuals and that is often reflected in our writer's notebooks.  

We read the hilarious story: 17 Things I am not Allowed to Do Anymore by Jenny Offill and discussed how to model our writing after an author.  We noticed the patterns of the author, style of writing and made attempts to write entries inspired by the story. We will also look at our entries and try to develop individual goals to improve our writing.  Each week your child will receive an assessment of their writing in the form of a rubric.  Please encourage your child to focus on their goals and make an effort to improve.

Writer's Notebook

2 full page entries a week

We will work our way up to 3 full page entries.   

After a review of the writing process, we began our personal narrative unit.  We discussed several strategies to help generate ideas for personal narrative stories.  One strategy was to list a person and then describe moments with that person.  Another strategy was to list an emotion and then describe a time when we felt that emotion.  (These same strategies could be utilized to help your child generate writer's notebook entries.)We will plan, draft, edit, revise and finally publish our personal narratives using Google Docs. 

In Reader's Workshop we have been working on ways to generate a written reading response.  We have read some really great books to help spark our reading responses.  We talked about how we can connect our lives to characters and their actions.  We discussed author's message and themes of books. We also talked about just stopping and writing down what we are thinking while we are reading.  Then we went back and looked over what we had written and tried to find a spark to write off of.

Here are a few of the books we've read and discussed:

This is a wonderful story about a young girl and her twin brother who is Autistic.  We  discussed the different ways people can communicate their feelings and how that isn't always with words.  

This is a great story about Friendship, War, The Holocaust and it generated great discussion about regret. Specifically how we sometimes say things we wish we could take back.

Please ask your child to utilize some of these strategies we've learned in Reader's Workshop in their Homework Reading Log entries.  Our main goal is for your child to use details from the text to support their written reading responses. We also read a powerful historical fiction book called Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki to help develop ideas for our Homework Reading Log.

Click on the book icon below to access a copy of the Homework Reading Log Expectations. 

Go Math!

We have been working on taking notes and reviewing some basic skills.  Our first few lessons have been on place value patterns, properties of operations, powers of 10, exponents and multiplication patterns.   WOW!  We've been working really hard.  You can continue to support your child by helping them improve their fact fluency.  Please utilize the Math Reflex website to assist your child in increasing their fact recall.  

We've also started our weekly math quizzes and everyone has done a fine job.  Most of the errors students are making are careless. Remind your child of the importance of checking over all of their work.