5B News for the Week of 9/10/12

Hello Parents!

Curriculum Night/Parent Orientation will be held this Thursday, September 13th, from 6:30-8:30 pm.  Please read the earlier posting on my blog, about this evening, for specific times. A letter was also sent home with your child about this evening.  Hope to see you all there. 

Also, the spelling lists have been posted.  The pretest will be this Monday.  If your child gets two words or less wrong on the pretest, he/she will be on the alternate list for the week.  If they get more than two words wrong on the pretest, they will be on the base word list. 

Here's what's going on in 5B this week: 

Language Arts-During language arts this week, we will continue our read aloud book entitled, Because of Mr. Terupt.  The students are really enjoying this book.  The author's second novel will be released in October and we are anxious to read it.  The students have been reading their personal books and writing "letters" to me about them.  I will soon begin to respond to these "letters" in their reading response journals.  Individual reading conferences also started this week and will continue through next week.  I have enjoyed chatting individually with the students about their books and their favorite genres.  In writing, the students have been working diligently on their own Fortunately/Unfortunately books.  They are coming along nicely.  They should be ready for you to see at curriculum night. 

Spelling- Spelling begins this week and the words have been posted on the blog.  Check them out!

Math Accel.- We are moving right along in the new Common Core Math curriculum.  This week, we discussed statistical questions and how they differ from non-statistical questions.  The students formulated their own statistical questions and surveyed the population (students in our class).  The next day, we plotted this data on our dot plots/line plots and then interpreted the data.  We learned a lot of new vocabulary words related to these topics.  On Monday, we will begin discussing histograms.

Science- We've been very active in science.  We have been discussing the weather and how weather instruments are used and what their purpose is.  We learned that an anemometer measures wind speed and we made our own.  We then went outside to test them.  They worked great!  Then, we made weather vanes, which involved a lot of measuring.  On Monday, we will be discussing states of matter and will be watching a short video on this topic.  We will then move into air pressure and will be conducting an air pressure experiment either Tuesday or Wednesday.

That's it for now.  Enjoy the week!

Mrs. Bennick