Happy Friday all!
I hope you all weathered the storm last week without much damage. Luckily, I only lost power for a few hours late Wednesday evening, some of my neighbors were not so lucky. Like many of you, I spent a good deal of time picking up twigs and branches on Thursday, but I also had time to read a FABULOUS new book by the author of Wonder, RJ Palaccio. The name of the book is White Bird, and it is the story of how Julien from Wonder got his name. Julien interviews his Grandmere to hear about her upbringing during the years of Nazi occupation. It talks about the Holocaust and its impacts in a very age appropriate way, and it's a GRAPHIC NOVEL! I have a waiting list of students wanting to read it! This should make for some great conversations. A few parents have been asking me for some other book recommendations. There are soooo many great books out today! We are now reading Because of Mr. Terupt and then we will move on to The Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus, a favorite of my class last year. Dusti Bowling has recently written a sequel, so I am sure I will have many wanting to read that as well. Another author I love is Lynda Mullaly Hunt. She has written Fish in a Tree, One for the Murphy's and her newest release is Shouting at the Rain. All stories deal with some great issues kids deal with daily, - friendships, wanting to belong, doing the right thing when it's not the easiest thing to do. These would all be great books to read with your child as they lead themselves to great discussions! A couple of other authors are Alan Gratz who has written books such as Refugee, Project 1065, Prisoner B-3087 and Allies. Refugee is available as an audio book on EPIC so a few kids have grabbed my classroom copies and are listening and following along! This is a fabulous book telling three different perspectives. Another series that has caught the attention of a few students is Spy School by Stuart Gibbs and for those sport lovers, Tim Green has titles such as Unstoppable, The Big Game, Football Genius and New Kid. A few of Tim Green's titles are available on Epic as well. Audible books are a great way to engage kids more in their reading. It is important that they read along as they listen, so they can see the words and hear the inflection while noticing punctuation and vocabulary. I will try to put together a more complete book list to share with you, there are just so many GREAT books out there right now! We finished The Honest Truth, students have had lots of good thoughts as to the similarities and differences between these two books by Dan Gemeinhart. It was great to see them looking at the author's style a little differently after we skyped with him! During our independent reading time we are continuing to "talk to our books". Using post its we are stopping to jot down what we are wondering, what surprises us etc. To make more connections to Social Studies, we are reading The Sign of the Beaver, as we learn about early colonization and the relationships between colonists and the Native Americans. In writing, we are adding pictures and captions to our informative writing pieces and cleaning up our introductions and conclusions. We have also continued working with the Non-Fiction Signposts. These past two weeks, we took a look at Extreme and Absolute language as well as Number & Stats, and analyzed why authors choose to use these. Then we took a look at our own articles to see if there would be a reason to add Extreme/Absolute Language or any Numbers/Stats. We are learning to use more precise language as we get ready to edit our articles for final publication! Stay tuned as we will plan a writing celebration once all are complete! In Math, we have started to dive into Division using partial quotients. Students have been working hard finding patterns as we divide by multiples of 10, 100 and 1,000s. We have reviewed rounding and compatible numbers as strategies to estimate before we divide to make sure our answers make sense. Be sure to ask them about the Quotient Cafe where we had some fun practicing partial quotients! Click here to use this amazing tool In Social Studies, we are putting together an interactive notebook as we look at reasons for colonization and the beginnings of the colonies. Students have been working in small groups compiling information as we start to dig into the geographic, economic, social and political reasons each colony was established. We will be looking at the climate as well as the rulers and beliefs of each colony. We are together looking to answer the key question "Was North America a Land of Opportunity for all?" On Tuesday, we had members of the Norwell Fire Department come in and discuss fire safety with all of us. Be sure to ask your child about this! Next week we have Officer Phelps coming in to remind us about Halloween safety. We are so lucky to have these professionals sharing their time with us! What an AWESOME Instructional Technology Class today with Mr. Tinker! Students persevered their way through a Math Escape Room! They were tackling questions in all areas of math, including even decimals and fraction standards that we haven't addressed yet! It was awesome to see them push themselves to use what they already know to make the connections and solve the problems. We will be continuing this next week - we have a few teams ready to BREAK OUT!! A HUGE thanks to Mr. Tinker for bringing this awesome technology into our classroom! It was great to meet with many of you to discuss your child's progress and discuss goals for the rest of the term. If you needed to reschedule your conference, just shoot me an email with some possible dates/times and we will get a date set. Important Dates to Remember
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18th - 5th Grade Holiday Concert & Nutcracker performance - mark your calendar!
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Good afternoon and HAPPY FRIDAY!
Well, this weather has sure thrown us all for a loop! Indoor recess is tough when it happens so many days in a row ! Hoping this Nor'easter heads on out SOON! It was a very busy week in Room 15! We started the week celebrating KINDNESS! Our fifth graders did a fabulous job leading the Community Meeting, talking about how to give compliments, say hello to make people feel comfortable and to try to spread kindness whenever we can! Today we wore t-shirts that showed something we love or enjoy doing so we could get to know each other a bit more! Lots of smiley faces were shared throughout Cole School! It was so great to see us all shining so brightly! We worked hard this week preparing for our Math assessment on Multiplying Whole Numbers and for our Science Assessment on Matter. It was great to see kids using their study guides to quiz each other, some making flash cards to help! We enjoyed Jeopardy games to review the key topics and were able to discuss areas where students were a little shaky. It was great to have 6 students come in for extra math help this week! They are OWNING their learning, by coming in and letting me know areas where they would like some additional practice! I hope to see even more faces as these sessions continue. I am attaching a copy of the schedule in case anyone needs it! Math Assessments are coming home in tonight's Friday folder, please review and sign the post it and then return test and post it to school for your child's file. I was pleased with their effort, just need to remember to take the time to check ALL computation, as many of the mistakes made were adding, not multiplying! Matter Assessments will come home next week! In Reading, we had an amazing SKYPE session with author Dan Gemeinhart. The kids were amazed to hear him tell them he hates to write, but he loves to tell a story so he knows he has to get it all down on paper in order to share them. He talked a great deal about the editing process and how he actually rearranges whole chapters or takes whole chapters OUT! It was such a great lesson for students to persevere with their writing! We are also continuing our work with Non-Fiction Sign posts. We reviewed contrasts and contradictions some more and thought about how writers use them to make a point. Mrs. Fuller was in to share another word study lesson with us and we are working through lost of different lists to build our phonemic awareness. We are finishing up The Honest Truth, be sure to ask your child about Mark and his adventure, it is a heartwarming story for sure! We had a fabulous enrichment program this week - Mrs. Money & the Coins. Presented by Rockland Trust, this was a great musical program teaching kids the difference between needs and wants and spending vs saving! A great lesson for all of us! We are ending our week with our little buddies from Mrs. Ryan's room! We created SPLATS to share - be sure to ask your child about these. They are a great way to build mental math strategies with students! I will post pictures later tonight of the "big kids" sharing their examples with their buddies! We are looking forward to many great activities with our buddies this year! Thank you as always for your support. Enjoy the long weekend! Will look forward to our conferences next week! Cheers! Maura Important Dates to Remember
Good afternoon and Happy October!
Another very busy week in Room 15! We started the week digging further into our study of Matter. We conducted 4 experiments to test the solubility of different substances when they were mixed with water. Be sure to ask your child to tell you what happens when you mix water and sugar vs when you mix water and flour. We talked about properties of matter and how they are used to identify different matter. Later in the week we did more hands-on looking at electrical conductivity. Students used open circuits to test acrylic, nylon, wood, brass, aluminum and copper. We looked at color, luster and conductivity to help us identify each block. Students did a great job working through each step! We have some great scientific minds among us! We will be finishing up our work on Matter and having an assessment later next week. Study guides will come home on Monday! Students should be able to talk about the difference between a solid, liquid and gas. What do the particles look like in each? What properties do we use to help us identify matter? What is the difference between a physical change and a chemical change? They should feel pretty confident with these questions, especially if they think back to the many hands on labs we did in class! In reading this week we started our study of the Non-Fiction Signposts. We started with contrasts and contradictions, when you are reading and something makes you stop and wonder. We read an article about banana farms and a very spirited discussion about child labor laws began! Students underlined places in the article where they wondered why? They noted where facts contradicted what they have known. Students did a great job digging in while discussed why good readers stop and wonder to build comprehension! We also finished reading The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise and are really excited to be Skyping with author Dan Gemeinhart on Tuesday at 1pm! Students wrote mini-reviews of the book and came up with some great questions to ask the author! We started reading another book by Mr. Gemeinhart, The Honest Truth, which is written in two different perspectives, kids are already enjoying this one! We also had a special guest come read to us this week. Principal Burns came in and shared the first few chapters of Because of Mr. Terupt. Lots of laughter as Mrs. Burns took on the voices of the different characters as she read to us. We had a great conversation about how reading with expression really makes listening so much more enjoyable, something we will be working on all year! We can't wait to finish reading this book after we read The Honest Truth. So many great books to read! Be sure to ask your child about both The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise and The Honest Truth, they should be able to share their favorite character and give you specific reasons why they do! In writing, we have been working hard organizing our thoughts around our informational articles. We talked about and then created outlines and then used our outlines to help build a table of contents. Students are now working on taking their outlines and writing rough drafts. They are anxious to add text features to their articles as they are learning how to bold words, add images etc in Google Docs. I am looking forward to peer editing next week and getting these articles fine-tuned! In Math, we are continuing our work with multiplication of larger numbers. Continued work on multiplication facts will help build our confidence as the numbers get larger! We are also realizing how much graph paper can help us stay organized! Students are working hard to make connections between the area model and the standard algorithm. This will be something we work on all year. We also completed our first Exemplar. These are multi-step word problems that take students through a 5-step process. (Understand, Plan, Solve, Communicate and Connect). We use color-coding to help them remember steps and walked through this one step-by-step together. Students did a nice job persevering through this problem, I look forward to working on many more of these with them this year! Mrs. Burns has sent out the link for parent conferences. Please let me know if the dates/times listed do not work for you and I will work with you to figure out a time that does! I look forward to discussing your child's progress so far and set goals with you and them for the year. I like the students to lead part of the conference, so when possible, I would love for you to bring them with you. Thank you for all of your support! Our extra math group starts next Wednesday at 8am - hoping to see many smiling faces - we will work from 8-8:45am. Also 24 club starts on Tuesday! This is a great way for students to have some fun playing a math game while building confidence with facts and order of operations. 24 club meets on Tuesdays from 8:15-8:45 in the library. SAVE THE DATE!!! We are having a 5th GRADE MATH NIGHT on November 13th from 6:30-7:30pm** More details to follow but mark the date for a fun night of math learning and connections! Have a great weekend! Maura Important Dates to Remember:
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March 2020
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