5B Activities for the Week of April 14th, 2014

Hello Parents and Students!

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

Just a reminder that there is no school this Friday, April 18th.  Enjoy the day off!

Also, please return the permission form for our upcoming field trip to WVHS Planetarium ASAP.  We will be visiting the planetarium next Monday, April 21st.

Many of you have returned your proof of residency forms.  Thank you!  However, if you have not, please also return those ASAP.

Word Study/Spelling:  We will begin Lesson 24 this week!  Our focus will continue to be on Latin and Greek roots.  This week we will be studying the root, -port.  The words have been posted to the blog.

Math Accel:  We will finish Unit 6 on Monday.  Our last lesson will be on order of operations.  We will discuss PEMDAS (parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition and subtraction).  Tuesday will be a review day.  The Unit 6 test will be on Wednesday and will continue into Thursday, if needed.

English Language Arts (ELA):  We have a lot going on in ELA for the next few weeks.  There will be a lot of activities pertaining to our current read aloud book, Red Kayak.  We have read through about chapter 7 at this point.  This week, we will be viewing a power point which includes some higher level vocabulary words from the book with visuals.  Also, we will be participating in a "find somebody" activity that will utilize some of these new words.  We will discuss what a protagonist is and do inquiry circles for review of chapters 1-3 and 4-7.  We will also be completing a character analysis chart.
Also, specific thought-provoking questions will be asked and students will answer these in their Reading Response Journals.  We will be using some Kagan strategies to share these entries with others.

Science:  We will be finishing up our Space unit at the end of this week or early next week.  We will continue our discussion of the Sun by completing a close read and utilizing some informational books that we have in our class.  A light year, astronomical unit and parsec will be discussed along with various other vocabulary words this week.  Star birth and death will be introduced and we will end the week discussing the different types of galaxies.  Students will be creating their own galaxies with black construction paper and colored chalk.  These always turn out really nice!  They will be on display in our room along with our Play Dough models of the layers of the Sun.

That is it for this week.

Please email me with any questions.

Thank you!

~Mrs. Bennick :-)