5B News for the Week of 9/17

Hello Parents!

It was wonderful to see many of you at curriculum night last Thursday evening.  Thank you for coming out!  Here's what's going on in 5B this week:

Spelling:  The new spelling words have been posted to the blog.  Please take a look at them when you get a moment.  The base words will always be posted on the left side, alternate words on the right.  The spelling pretest will be on Monday morning and the spelling test will be on Friday.

Language Arts:  This past week, we finished up our Fortunately books.  We also participated in a written writing interview, similar to the reading interview we took a couple of weeks ago.  The writing process for our writing workshop was introduced on Friday along with our new writing project.  The students will have a choice as to what they want to write during writing workshop time over the next three weeks or so.  We brainstormed many writing activities and they are very enthusiastic about all of their choices.  Some are choosing to write scripts for plays, a book of recipes, a collection of lists, an essay, a compilation of poems, comics, etc.  This should make writing fun for the students.  In reading, we continued our class read aloud, Because of Mr. Terupt, and wrote summaries and letters to me about the chapters we covered.  We also read and discussed our first Time For Kids magazine this week.  TFK always sparks great conversation in the room!  Reading conferences will be complete, with all students, on Monday.  I just have three students left to conference with.  This upcoming week we will read a story from our anthology entitled, We'll Never Forget You, Roberto Clemente.  We will have a test on this story later in the week.  We will also continue our grammar focus on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and simple subjects over the next few weeks.

Math Accel.:  We finished up our Histograms at the end of last week.  We were able to spend some time on Friday in the computer lab playing math games, which the students always love!  On Monday, we will begin Stem and Leaf Plots and then move into Box Plots and a refresher on landmarks...such as mean, median, mode, range, etc.  Math class is going very well! 

Science:  After discussing the Scientific Method last Thursday and Friday, we got to test our hypotheses by going outside and doing the soda/Mentos experiment.  It worked wonderfully!  It was a lot of fun.  We collected the data, analyzed it and came up with our conclusions.  Ask your child about it! This week in science, we will begin the week discussing barometers and their uses.  We will do a short experiment, with barometers, on Monday and then make our own.  We will then learn how to read a barometer and how they are used to predict the weather.  Fun times!

That's it for now.  Have a wonderful weekend! 

Mrs. Bennick