Mrs. Holzhauer's 5th grade Blog 2/16/18

Happy Friday Families!

I hope everyone had a fantastic week!  It is hard to believe that our Valentine's Day party was our last 5th Grade classroom party.  Thank you so much again to our parent volunteers for making the party one to remember! We had the best time! 

Thank you also to all of our families who generously donated book fair books to our classroom library! The PTO also generously donated several popular titles! I just love the excitement of the kids when I am able to get new books into their hands! It is the absolute BEST feeling! I believe it is so important to surround our students with wonderful choices of books to read!

Our students are working hard to finish up all of the assessments as we start to wrap up Trimester 2! Here are the targets we will be beginning in the next few weeks:

Literacy:

We are completing our final unit the grading period, which focused on the theme of Finding Courage.  Our students are currently working hard on completing their end-of-unit assessments.  Today, with a break in our testing, we played a fun game of "Four Corners" to practice point-of-view and perspective! Be sure to ask your student about it! As we start our next unit, our focus will shift to the theme of Exploring New Worlds!  Our first text in the unit, Explorers: Triumphs and Troubles, focuses on various explorers and their positive (and some negative) impact on the world.

Writing

Students will turn their focus to opinion writing.  Students' strong opinions typically lead to many interesting discussions and debates within our classroom!

Math

We are wrapping up Unit 5, which focused on multiplication and division of fractions. Please make sure your child studies for next week's Unit 5 Post Test over the long weekend.

In the coming weeks, our focus will shift to Unit 6, which covers the following targets:

** 5.G.4: Classifying two dimensional figures.

** 5.G.1: Locating points on a coordinate grid.   

** 5.MD.5b: Apply the formulas V = l x w x h and V = B x h when solving for the volume of rectangular prisms.

** 5.OA.3: Use the relationship between x and y coordinates to generate a multiple operation expression that represents the rule for the coordinate pairs (this can be a tricky one!)

Social Studies

We are ending our patriotism unit and we will begin the third trimester studying Supply & Demand and Trade. We will be looking at the difference between goods and services and the importance in our lives. Our much anticipated 5th grade trade fair will take place during this unit!

Science

Today we finished up our study of constellations. We had a Quizlet competition between groups in order to review the learning we've done throughout the last few weeks! Boy, it can definitely get exciting during such games!

During our upcoming trimester we will start to study matter and work on investigations to help us determine what causes substances to change. There will be some fun, hands-on investigations during this unit!

​Important Dates and Friendly Reminders:

***TONIGHT--Movie night @ 6:30 

** Monday, February 19th: NO SCHOOL (President's Day)
**Tuesday, February 20th--PTO Special Lunch (Urban BBQ)

** Friday, February 23rd - End of the Grading Period/Half Day of school--Dismissal @11:45

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.  Thank you and have a fantastic extended weekend!