5B News for the Week of September 9, 2013

Hello Parents and Students!

Just a reminder that Curriculum Night is this Wednesday evening at 6:30.  A detailed letter which includes the evening's schedule has been uploaded on my Edline page under "News".   Hope to see you all there!

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

Spelling/Word Study:  We will begin our first spelling lesson this week which will focus on closed syllables.  In class, we will be discussing what a closed syllable is and how to identify closed syllables in words and diagram them.  There will be a test on Friday and I will let the students know tomorrow what they need to study.  More information about this new word study/spelling program will be introduced at curriculum night.

Math Accel:  We are moving right along in math!  We are about midway through the first unit and will be having our first quiz tomorrow.  (Monday)  This week, we will be reviewing multiplication of decimals which will include exponents and powers of 10.  Also, the students will be creating their own menus in class.  This will be about a week-long project.

English Language Arts:  We will be continuing on in our Identity theme.  This week, we will be reading the poem by George Ella Lyon entitled, Where I'm From.  The students will be creating their own Where I'm From poem and will also be asked to create their own family tree at home.  I will send more information home this week about this project.  I also created my own family tree which the students can refer to as a model when creating their own.  We will share our family trees early next week.  We are still reading the book, Because of Mr. Terupt and individual reading conferences started last week.  I've had the opportunity to conference with about six or seven students so far.  I plan to conference with about five to six students per day.

Social Studies:  We will continue to discuss explorers.  Our topics for this week will include Africa's Trading Empires and European Explorers.  Most of us finished our Think Quests, but there are still a few who need to finish up.  I did reserve some computers in the LMC cluster for tomorrow for those students who still need to finish.

It's going to be a busy week!  See you all Wednesday evening.

Mrs. Bennick