Hello Parents and Students,
Here we are moving into the last week of September! Happy Fall. Time is flying by.
Just a reminder that CoGat testing will occur on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week for all 2nd and 5th graders.
Here's what's going on in 5B this week:
Spelling: Unit 3 will be our focus this week. The spelling words for this week have been posted to the blog. Remember, pretests are on Mondays, tests are on Fridays.
Language Arts: We accomplished a lot this past week in reading, writing and grammar. Our writing workshop pieces are coming along nicely. Many groups have chosen to write scripts/plays and will perform them in front of the class. Other students are working diligently on writing essays, comic strips, recipes, and stories. Everyone has been working hard and showing great creativity. Possibly, later this week, some students and groups will be ready to present their projects. In reading, we will continue to discuss current events through our Time For Kids magazines. Our current TFK issue is about the upcoming Presidential election and we will finish discussing it on Monday followed by a quiz. During reading this week we will be making our own book hooks. We will also be doing a blurb pass, in which students read the back cover of a book and tell a quick blurb about it to inspire other kids to read it. Our forty book program seems to be going well for many of the students. They are keeping track of the books they read on their reading logs and are checking off the genre on their genre charts as they finish each book. Our read aloud book continues to be, Because of Mr. Terupt, and it is getting very good now. Something surprising is about to happen.
Math Accel: This week we finished stem and leaf plots and box and whisker plots. We watched a couple of very informative videos about creating these types of graphs and why they are useful. The students visited a couple of interactive websites to practice their skills with these graphs as well. They then created their own graphs either independently or in a group. All is going well in math. This week, we will begin doing research on the weather. The students will then learn about broken line graphs and will construct their own based on realistic weather data that they gather from their research....real life learning.
Science-We are just about finished with our first science unit, weather. The students have been doing some research on the laptops on various types of clouds. The students have defined the type of cloud, indicated what kind of weather that particular cloud brings, and sketched what the cloud looks like. They are required to research four different clouds. However, many students have opted to do even more cloud research at home for extra credit. The science weather test will be this Thursday. Study guides were sent home both via email and in your child's backpack.
Social Studies-About midweek, we will be switching over to social studies and our first topic of discussion will be Christopher Columbus. We will be using a couple of different books to introduce Columbus, one of them being Encounter by Jane Yolen and Howard Zin's, A People's History of the United States.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend! As always, if you have any questions, please email me.
Mrs. Bennick
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Asheville, North Carolina
