October 22, 2014 Newsletter

What we have been learning in fifth grade:

Daily 5/CAFE: This week students will complete their Daily 5 Menu entitled: “Katie’s Trunk”.  We will continue to review text structure and also analyze multiple accounts of the same event or topic, noting similarities and differences in the point of view they represent. 

Writing: This week we will begin to write an opinion piece on a topic supporting a point of view with reasons and information. They will strive to provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details.

Math:  Students have fininshed the coordinate grid unit and are now starting multiplying and dividing decimals. They will be multiplying and dividing decimals to hundredths, using concrete models or drawings and strategies based on place value properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction. They also will be relating the strategy to a written method and explaining the reason it was used.

Science: We are finishing up our force and motion unit. The students were given a study guide on Monday. They need to complete 20 of the 29 questions by this Friday. They can work on this in class and at home. Their test will be next Tuesday, the 28^th and their Case 21 will be on Wednesday the 29^th. 

October 8, 2014 Newsletter

Here is what we have been learning in fifth grade:

Daily 5/CAFE: This week students will complete their Daily 5 Menu entitled: “And then What Happened, Paul Revere?”; a biography.  We will be concentrating on nonfiction this quarter. Students will spend time learning to compare and contrast the text structure of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts.  Examples of text structure we will cover include: chronology, comparison, cause/effect, and problem/solution.

Writing: In Quarter 2, students will write an opinion piece on a topic supporting a point of view with reasons and information. They will strive to provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details.

Math:  Students are finishing up their geometry unit, where they have been working on understanding that attributes belonging to a category of two dimensional figures also belong to all subcategories of that category. For example, all rectangles have four right angles and squares are rectangles, so all squares have four right angles. They have also been learning to classify two-dimensional figures in a hierarchy based on properties. Next, we will be moving into using and understanding coordinate grids. They will be representing real world and mathematical problems by graphing points in the first quadrant of the coordinate plane, and interpret coordinate values of points in the context of the situation.

Science: We have started our Force and Motion unit. The students are beginning to understand the concepts of force and motion and the relationship between them. They are also inferring the motion of objects in terms of how far they travel in a certain amount of time and the direction in which they travel.