5B Activities for the Week of April 6, 2015

Welcome back!  I hope you all had an enjoyable Spring Break!

We're already heading into the last quarter of school.  Time is flying by!

There are no reminders for this week.

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

Word Study:  Again, we are studying the vowel team syllable type.  This week, we will focus on words that have -ou, -ow and -ea in them.  We will be defining the words on Monday and the test will be on Friday.  There will also be homophones this week that we will review in class but the students will not be tested on the homophones, only the vowel team words.

Math Acceleration:  We will continue our study of Geometry this week.  On Monday, we will be finishing up our lesson on finding the area of composite shapes and then we will be problem solving changing dimensions.  We will then begin studying volume.

English Language Arts (ELA):  We finished the book, Red Kayak, just before spring break and since the students loved Red Kayak, I began reading the sequel to it entitled, The Journey Back.  It's Digger's point of view.  We will not have time in class to continue reading this book, so many of the students will want to read it outside of class.  However, our new anchor text for the 4th quarter is entitled, Maniac Magee, which we will begin reading either this week or next.  The students presented their historical event newscasts just before break and they were incredible!  I took videos of some of the kids who wanted to be videoed and I can send them to you via email if you'd like.  Just let me know.  Also, the students will be writing their own historical figure interview questions this week for the second half of our performance task. The 4th quarter theme is moving forward.  This theme ties into our previous one, making choices, and how choices can determine how and when to move forward.

Science:  We will be studying stars/solar system/space/galaxies for the next few weeks.  We will begin with an introduction to space early this week and then move onto studying a very important star, the sun, later in the week.

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

Thank you!

Mrs. Bennick :-)