5B Activities for the Week of April 20th, 2015

Hello Parents and Students,

Here are the reminders for the week:

1.  Soman Chainani, author of The School for Good and Evil and A World Without Princes, will be visiting our school this Tuesday.  We have asked the students to come dressed as fairy tale characters or prince/princesses to honor the author.

2.  We will be having a bike safety assembly on Tuesday as well.  This is a very informative assembly about safety when riding bikes which is so important this time of year!

3.  The 5th grade musical will be this Wednesday, 4/22, in the afternoon and in the evening for parents.

4.  Please return the permission form for our field trip to Hill Middle School which will be on May 4th.  Thank you to all of you who have already returned them!

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

Word Study:  This week we will be focusing on words that have silent letters.  The words have been posted to the blog.  Students will be responsible for spelling these words along with identifying their meanings.  The test will be on Friday.

Math Acceleration:  In MA this week we will be finishing up our Geometry unit.  Our last lessons will be on Monday and Tuesday and will be on finding the surface area of both rectangular and triangular prisms.  On Wednesday, we will be creating our own study guides to prepare for the test which will be this Friday, April 24th.  The students should be studying all of their notes and homework sheets that they have been working on these past few weeks.

English Language Arts (ELA):  We will continue studying our anchor text, Maniac Magee.  We will be completing some text-dependent questions and writing in our journals about the characters.  The students will also be introduced to a new project which will combine both ELA and SS.  This project will require the students to do extensive research on a topic pertaining to the US Constitution and then create a foldable about their topic(s).   Guidelines for this project will be coming home this week.  We will also be studying a story from our reading anthology entitled, Hattie's Birthday Box, which was introduced to the students late this week.

Science:  In science, stars will continue to be our focus.  This week, we will be researching star sizes and shapes, colors of stars (classifying) and star birth and death.  Our quiz on the sun vocabulary words will be on Tuesday.

Social Studies (SS)- We will be completing research on the US Constitution project and will also be moving toward the study of the Westward Movement including Lewis and Clark and the Louisiana Purchase.  (This will be ongoing for the next few weeks.)

That is it for now!  Have a great week and please email me with any questions.

Mrs. Bennick :-)