And the Wheels on the Bus Go Round…..
Each day brings us a step closer to refining our routines, procedures, and how to work together as a class! Things are rolling along nicely. Now that we’re fifteen school days into our new year, your children have gotten a chance to get a taste of our new Literacy curriculum: Good Habits, Great Readers. Ask them to share with you what they’ve learned about choosing “good fit” books in a variety of genres, reading voraciously, setting goals, keeping reading logs, and building their stamina as ways of improving their reading skills. They have also been able to practice the strategies great readers use to get meaning from the print: checking for understanding periodically by retelling or summarizing what they’ve read, monitoring their comprehension by asking questions, making predictions, inferring and using evidence from the text to support conclusions, and fixing up break downs in comprehension by backing up and rereading, considering what they already know about a topic, and cross checking – making sure their decoding is accurate, making sure the word sounds right, and that it makes sense. We’ve begun work to expand our vocabularies. Additionally, we’ve been learning about mapping, landforms, and water features in geography and started our first project: the Cartographer’s Challenge. We’ve reviewed the steps of the writing process and begun to analyze the six traits of quality writing. We’re working to develop our number sense, the understanding that numbers behave in predictable ways (patterns) and consistently (the same way every time). We’re learning that science is about concepts (the big ideas), inquiry (conducting investigations and experiments), and applying what we know and discover to solve problems in the physical, earth and space, and life domains. Needless to say, we’ve been busy!
Remember to check out the Homework and the Latest Greatest News and Noteworthy pages on our website to learn specific details on assignments for practice or projects to demonstrate competency and to hear about special events to extend and enrich our learning. Thank you for sending your very best to us everyday! It’s our priviledge to be able to give our very best so they can become the very best hope for our shared future. The best is yet to come!
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Welcome Back to School!
I’m so excited to starting this adventure with you and your child! Fifth grade is not only challenging in that skills will be developed enabling your son or daughter to be successful in sixth grade and beyond, but it’s also a time when developmentally an awareness begins to develop about his or her place in our learning community, our school, our world.
Having said that, we’ll spend a considerable amount of time learning how to be organized, how to use routines and resources to help us be successful, how to be a proactive problem solver and critical thinker. We’ll develop fluency with math computation, reading decoding and comprehension, and our ability to communicate effectively in writing. We’ll have a solid understanding of the physical world we live in and of what science is and how we act as scientists everyday.
You can expect for these big ideas and skills to be practiced and competency to be demonstrated through the completion of authentic projects. Our first is the Cartographer’s Challenge which will be followed by Fifth Grade’s Wax Museum / Boo-ography project. Be sure to check out the homework section of our class page and the Monday Mailbox for a hard copy of the explanation and expectations for the projects.
Here’s to a fabulous school year! The best is yet to come!
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