5B News for the Week of 9/3/12

Hello 5B Parents!

I hope that you are enjoying the long weekend.  Just a reminder, there is no school on Monday, September 3rd, due to Labor Day and no school on Tuesday, September 4th due to Building Articulation Day for staff.  School is back in session on Wednesday morning (late start). 

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

Language Arts:  We will continue to discuss book genres and will be watching a very informative powerpoint about the different genres and subgenres.  The students will then participate in an activity in which they will categorize books into the different genres.  During this time, I will also begin having individual reading conferences with the students so that I can get an idea of the types of books they enjoy reading and how their fluency and comprehension skills are progressing.  This week, I will also introduce a writing activity based on the book, Fortunately.  The students will then begin writing their own version of this story. 

Math Accel:  Last week, the students took the Unit 1 pretest, which was quite difficult.  Pretests are given so that I can get an idea of what skills the students may already know, so that I can form guided math groups within the classroom.  Pretests will never be graded.  Once I have gone through the pretests, I design my lessons based on the students' needs.  We will start this week with a lesson from the Every Day Math Student Resource Book.  The students will participate in a scavenger hunt in which they will work in groups to find which pages specific information is on.  Moving forward, the first unit focuses on graphing.  We will begin this unit studying line plots/dot plots. 

Science:  We just finished up our discussion of the layers of the atmosphere.  The students were asked to take their layers of the atmosphere books home to work on them a little over the weekend.  We will only have about 15 minutes to finish them up in class on Wednesday.  Please return them on Wednesday as I would like to hang them up in the classroom.  Next in science, we will be talking about weather instruments and what the different instruments do.  The first instrument we will discuss is the anemometer. We will work in groups and make our own anemometers.  After that, we will move onto barometers.  We have had some great discussions about Hurricane Isaac.  We have been following the storm on CNN daily and the students are really into it. 

Spelling:  We will begin spelling the week of September 10th....next week!

Have a great week everyone! 

Mrs. Bennick