5B News for the Week of January 14, 2013

Hello Parents and Students:

Just a reminder that there is no school on Monday, January 14th.  It is a Teacher Work Day.  Enjoy the extra day off! 

Today marks the end of the Second Quarter of school.  Report cards will go home next Friday, January 18th via backpack mail. 

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

Spelling:  We are on Unit 16 this week.  The pretest will be on Tuesday and the test will be on Friday.  I asked the students to check the blog over the weekend to take a look at the spelling words since there will be one day less to study this week.

Language Arts:  In reading this week, we will be reading a book from our anthology entitled, Oceans.  We will focus on vocabulary, main idea and details.  We will do a mini lesson with vocabulary prior to listening to the story on CD.  We will be doing a fun following directions/main idea activity with this story as well.  The test for this story will be on Friday and it will be open book. In our Time For Kid's magazine, our focus will be on inventions.  This topic will be cross-curricular as we will also be creating inventions in science soon.  We will be completing a couple of graphic organizers to go along with this story.  In writing, we will be answering an extended response question related to the story, Oceans.

Math Accel.:  Currently, we just completed a project in which the students created their own real-world ratio story.  They completed a table, based on their story, and then graphed the data on a coordinate plane. We also discussed the four quadrants of a coordinate plane and ordered pairs. They then interpreted their data.  We did some interactive graphing practice at the IXL website and watched a great video on graphing at LearnZillion.com.  Moving forward, we will continue to summarize data on a graph and start to wrap up Unit 3.  Expect a study guide to come home late in the week or possibly early the following week. 

Science:  Lots of exciting stuff going on in science right now!  The room is a mess, but we're having fun.  We have been identifying objects that are magnetic and non-magnetic.  We have made predictions and then tested them.  We still have one experiment to do with magnets and then we will be creating our own inventions.  The guidelines for this project will be forthcoming.  We talked briefly about it in class and everyone is very excited about it.  When all of the inventions have been completed, we will have an Invention Convention in which the students travel from room to room to vote on their favorites. 

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please email me.

Thank you and enjoy the weekend!

Delissa Bennick