Happy Friday Families!
It was great seeing all of you at conferences to discuss your student's academic and social emotional progress. I loved that I was able to learn more about each student through the conversations we shared! Now that we're deep into the first grading period, I am excited to see how much more our students will grow throughout the year. We've been enjoying Fall and Halloween themed activities that tie in with our learning targets and have been playing some fun team building activities during class meeting. Today we played the Halloween edition of "Finish the Phrase." Be sure to ask your student about it!
Literacy
Our students finished our first longer text, The Night of the Spadefoot Toads. The students really enjoyed sharing a longer text that extended over multiple weeks. Using this shared text, we worked on literacy skills such as summarizing and identifying the narrator's point of view. They really LOVED this book! I wish there was a sequel for kids to read independently!
Next week we will start reading a nonfiction text titled Explorers: Triumphs and Troubles. This text highlights the details and impact of various explorers' expeditions throughout history. As we read the text, we are working on identifying the author's main point/s while determining reasons and evidence as support. To practice determining the author's main point/s, we ask ourselves, "What does the author MOST want us to know or believe about what was written?" We will continue our work on this learning target using various texts. This text is organized in such a way that it presents the "troubles" that several of the explorers faced. The kids will enjoy hearing about some of the more unusual ones!
Writing
We started our first analytical prompt this week. Students chose an ecosystem and researched the threats that there are to that ecosystem, as well as ways to protect that ecosystem. We are now working on planning body paragraphs that are well supported with not only text evidence, but our own words in an explanation.
Math
We are continuing to focus on fractions as we get closer to finishing our second unit in math. Our students are moving away from utilizing money and time to model the operations and are learning how to add and subtract fractions with unlike denominators by finding common denominators and equivalent fractions (5.NF.1). Over the past week, we practiced how to solve fractions story problems (5.NF.2). We will begin our new unit next week, which focuses on place value and adding and subtracting decimals. Those students who demonstrated mastery on any of the targets will work on extension activities as well.
Social Studies
We are really enjoying our first Social Studies unit! Our discussions have focused around the perceptions of Indigenous American Cultures and learning how to formulate questions to help guide our students' learning on how to better honor the cultural heritage of this land. We will be exploring more about the perceptions of the first Thanksgiving Dinner.
Upcoming Dates
Tuesday, October 24th - Early Release
Friday, October 27th- Willy Wildcats Chocolate Factory- PTO Event
Tuesday, October 31st- Halloween Class Parties in afternoon
Friday, November 10th- End of Trimester 1
Thursday, November 16th- Family Reading Night
Friendly Reminders
**Please remind your student to charge his/her iPad and Logitech Crayon every night.
**If your child participates in orchestra or band, please remind him/her to bring their instrument on their lesson day.
**Please remember to send your student with a healthy snack - nothing feeds the brain like a healthy snack!
**Please continue to have your student practice their multiplication facts up to 12.
