Here's what's going on in 5B this week! September 4-6

Hello Parents and Students!

 Just a reminder that there is no school tomorrow, Monday, due to it being Labor Day. Also, there is no school for students on Tuesday, due to Building Articulation Day. See you on Wednesday...remember it's late start!

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

 I needed to change some of my lesson plans last week due to the heat. We were scheduled to use the computer lab a few times to work on some lessons, but were unable to because the computer lab was being used as a cooling station for the students who are in upstairs' classrooms. Therefore, we stayed in our room and worked on other things. Therefore, some lessons that were planned for last week will be taught this week. Hopefully, the weather will cool down and schedules will be back to normal.

Spelling/Word Study: I will be introducing this brand new program to the students this week. The students will be taking some notes in their composition notebooks about this program, but will not have anything to study yet. Next week, since we will have five full days of school, the students will be assigned their first spelling/word study lesson. I will explain this program in more detail at Curriculum Night on September 11th. I will also have a handout for you that evening that will answer Frequently Asked Questions about this new program.

Math Accel: We are moving right along in math. We had some fun reviewing addition, subtraction and multiplication of decimals this past week playing Jeopardy. The students are diligently taking notes and previewing and reviewing videos. Several of the students stated that they felt Math Acceleration seems easy, but I assured them that it does get more difficult as time goes on. We are in our review stage right now. This week, we will continue on in Unit 1 working with decimals. We will be creating our own grocery lists and we may get to the menu activity, but that will most likely be next week.

English Language Arts (ELA): This week our focus will be Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Last week the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of his famous speech, I Have A Dream. We will be reading an excerpt from this famous speech (close read) and the students will be responsible for analyzing it and answering questions about it. I will build background knowledge by reading a couple of MLK books and possibly watching a couple of short video clips about MLK. As usual, we will continue our read-aloud book, Because of Mr. Terupt. The students are really into this book and many of them can relate to the characters. We completed our character analysis. Since we were able to check out books from the LMC last week, the students should all have a current personal reading book that they are reading. We will continue to have silent reading in class and I will begin pulling the students aside individually soon for private reading conferences with me. We are starting to establish a routine in class now.

Social Studies: Since we could not work on our Think Quest last week because of the unavailability of the computer lab, we will try to get to it this week. I did reserve the lab for a couple of sessions this week. However, since we started a chapter in our social studies book, we will finish that first before moving on to the Think Quest.

Also, I have asked the students to keep any papers that we complete in their binders in the correct subject area so that they have them to refer to or study from later on. Currently, there are no scheduled quizzes or tests because we have not covered enough material yet. Stay tuned! That's it for now! Enjoy the remainder of the weekend!

 Mrs. Bennick :-)