5B News for the Week of 12/17/12

Hello Parents and Students:

Here we are....the final week before Winter Break.  This year seems to be moving by very quickly. 

Just a couple of reminders this week.  First, we will be having our Citizenship Celebration this Thursday, December 20th.  The following movies will be shown:  Elf, A Christmas Story, Finding Nemo and Frosty/Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  If there is a movie that you'd prefer your child NOT see, please let me know and I will point them in another direction.  Thank you.  :-)

Also, on this day, the students can wear their pajamas and bring in a stuffed animal from home, but this is optional.  Hot chocolate will be served.  Please remember to return the permission form as soon as possible. 

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

Spelling:  We are on Unit 14 this week.  The spelling pretest will be on Monday and the test will be on Friday, as usual.  The words have been posted to the blog.

Language Arts:  This week, we will continue to focus on our historical fiction genre.  We will be reading a Reading A-Z book entitled, Historic Peacemakers.  This book discusses people from around the World who promoted peace during their lifetimes.  This is a higher level book with challenging vocabulary, therefore, we will also be completing a vocabulary word-meaning map to go along with it.  Open-ended questions will be asked toward week's end and the students will work in groups to complete discussion questions.  In writing, the students will be doing a structured writing piece.  The topic will be given to them (Plans for Winter Break) and they will need to complete a five paragraph essay which will include an introduction, three main body paragraphs, and a conclusion.  I will model one in class.  We discussed simple and complete predicates in grammar last week and will continue to integrate grammar into our writing lesson this week, most likely focusing on comma usage.

Math Accel:  We are moving along in Unit 3.  We have studied algebraic expressions and dependent and independent variables.  Moving forward, we will be working on rate and ratio reasoning to solve real-world and mathematical problems.  We will also be doing some review with adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing decimals.  We will do a fun, real-world math problem with these skills. 

Science:  We just switched back over into science a couple of days ago.  Atom structure/vocabulary has been introduced and we will be doing some research on elements this week during science.  The students are excited to be back into science and are very enthusiastic about using the online interactive periodic table.  We will be drawing and labeling atoms this week. 

That's it for now. Please contact me with any questions or concerns.  Enjoy the weekend!

Delissa Bennick