5B News for the Week of January 7th, 2013

Hello Parents and Students!

Welcome Back!  Happy New Year!
I hope that you all had a wonderful Winter Break.

First of all, there's a lot going on our first week back.  Friday, January 11th, is the last day of the Second Quarter.  Report cards go home the following Friday, January 18th, via backpack mail. 

We will be participating in Whole Group CBM Testing this week.  This will take place on Tuesday, January 8th.  These tests are to ensure that the students continue to make progress in reading comprehension and math.

Also, Individual R-CBM Testing will take place on Thursday for 5B.  This is to check progress for reading fluency.

Late in the week, we will be viewing the movie, Night of the Twisters.  This is the movie that goes along with our class read-aloud book that we just recently finished in class, which has the same title.

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

Spelling:  We are on Unit 15 this week.  The words have been posted on the blog.  The pre-test is on Monday and the test is Friday.

Language Arts:  We will be doing a variety of things during this time this week.  For grammar, we will focus on pronouns.  We will discuss why we need them and we will also be introduced to subject pronouns.  We will be reading a Time For Kids magazine for current events and will complete a graphic organizer to go along with it.  We will also integrate some science into this time period, so that we can cover everything that needs to be covered in science over the next couple of weeks.

Math Accel.:  During math, we will continue to work on ratios and rates using tables and equations.  We will be doing some online interactive practice and also some real-world mathematical practice.  As usual, there will be group work this week involving rates and ratios. 

Science:  We will be very busy in science these next two weeks.  Magnetism will be introduced which will lead to Electricity.  We will be watching a video or two at Discovery Education about Magnetism. 
Also, we will be reading a Reading A-Z book about Magnetism which will give us some background knowledge about this subject.  Vocabulary will also be discussed.  There will be discussion questions to complete and a short quiz to go along with the book.  We will also be using our science books to learn about Magnetism.  We will be doing a couple of experiments which will focus on what magnets attract and a magnetic tug of war.  This should be fun!

That's it for now.  Enjoy the weekend and see you soon!

Mrs. Bennick :-)