5B News for the Week of October 8th

Hello Parents & Students:

There's a lot going on in school this week.  First, there is no school this Monday, October 8th, due to the Columbus Day holiday. 

Interim Assessments will take place this week Tuesday through Friday in class.  A form was sent home earlier in the week that described these assessments which will be used to guide the ongoing evolution of our curricula of the recently adopted Common Core State Standards.

On a happier note, the students of 5B recently earned their first reward of the year by filling the class marble jar!!!  On Friday, October 12th, the students may bring in an electronic device (with a signed permission form that was sent home), their musical instrument to play for us, and some gum.  The students will have time during the day on Friday to use/play with these items. 

Also, the author, Annie Barrows, will be visiting May Watts on Thursday, October 11th.  She is the author of the Ivy + Bean book series.  If you would like to purchase an autographed copy of one of her books, please click on the following link for more information. 
http://watts.ipsd.org/News.aspx?id=45683

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

Spelling:  We will be on Unit 5 this week.  The spelling pretest will be on Tuesday since there is no school on Monday.  If you feel your child may have difficulty learning the words having one day less to study, they may stay on the base list this week if it works best for them.  Also, I encouraged the students to visit my blog over the weekend and look at the spelling words so that they could get a jump start on learning them. 
The test will be on Friday.

Language Arts- We recently finished up our book hooks, which turned out very nice and also our Writer's Workshop projects.  I was so impressed with the level of preparation that all of the students put forth for the Writer's Workshop Project.  They were all very well done and it was a pleasure to listen to all of them.  This is a very creative group of kids!  This week in reading some of the skills that we will be focusing on will be locating information in text, finding facts to support your thinking and fact vs. opinion.  We will be using TFKs and, most likely, a story from our anthology to concentrate on these skills.  I will continue my next round of reading conferences with the students and we will continue to write in our Reading Response Journals for writing practice. We also covered some grammar this week in class which included prepositions and simple subjects. 

Math Accel.- Unit 1 study guides were sent home on Friday.  The Unit 1 test will be this Thursday.  The students are to begin working on their study guides and we will review them in class Tuesday & Wednesday to clarify any questions that they may have.

Social Studies- We finished our discussion of Christopher Columbus late this week and took a short quiz about his life and expeditions on Friday.  Next in social studies, we will begin discussing Jamestown and the colonies.  Once we cover this material, we will begin our colony project the following week.  Social studies is starting to become alive!  The colony project should be a lot of fun for the kids.

That's it for now.  If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.  Enjoy the long weekend!

Mrs. Bennick