5B Activities for the Week of November 24th, 2014

Hello Parents and Students!

Here are the reminders for this week:

1.  Due to Thanksgiving Break, there is no school on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday this week.  Enjoy this time with your family.

2.  I have added the PARCC practice test link on my blog.  It is on the right side.  Please take some time to work through both the ELA and MATH practice PARCC assessments at home.  We will continue to practice at school, but the students will become more comfortable with the assessments with additional practice.

3.  The GATES testing informational letter went home via backpack mail this past Friday.  It is just for your information.  We will be testing the first week in December.

4.  The field trip form for attending Hill Middle School's Honors Concert went home last week.  Please sign it and return to school at your earliest convenience.

Here's what's going on in the curricular areas this short week: 

Word Study:  Due to the short week, we will not be having word study this week.  However, I will be fitting in some grammar practice instead.

Math Accel:  Currently, we are working on positive and negative integers in math class.  We will continue this practice on Monday and Tuesday this week.  We have been practicing placing integers on number lines.  We will be working on some real-World practice with integers and we will be having an exit slip on Monday or Tuesday on this skill.

ELA:  Last week, the students were introduced to the book, Confessions of a Former Bully.  We have been studying this book and have discussed times when we, or someone we know, has been bullied.  We have discussed strengths we have for standing up to a bully and tools that we can use when faced with a bully.  We have analyzed quotes from this book and have begun relating characters from other books we've read in class this year to identify with these quotes.  We will continue this activity this week.  We are also moving along in our anchor text, The Liberation of Gabriel King.  We have built a lot of background knowledge about this book/time in history and have examined a lot of vocabulary.
We will continue with our journalling activities and reading responses pertaining to this book again this week.  We will also be fitting in some current events time this week.

Science:  We have been very busy in science these days.  We completed a couple of magnetism experiments last week and will finish up our study of magnetism this week.  We will be moving forward to electricity and our first topic will be static electricity.  We also completed our Science Elements Journals this week and created a model of an atom.

That's it for now.  Please email me with any questions.

Thank you!

Mrs. Bennick :-)