August 31st - September 4th

Upcoming Events

Wednesday, September 9th ~ Sack lunch order forms for the Ironwoods are due

Friday, September 11th ~ Fall and Spring Conference Sign Ups available

Tuesday, September 15th ~ Picture Day, 5th Grade goes at 10:20 am*, Health and Liability forms for Ironwoods are due

Wednesday, September 16th ~ Ironwoods Fifth Grade Field Trip**

Friday, September 18th ~ Family Fun Fest

Monday, September 21st ~ Mid-Quarter

Wednesday, September 23rd ~ Noon Dismissal, Teacher Professional Development

Friday, October 2nd ~ Pet Blessing

*Picture Order forms and information went home on Thursday, September 3rd. You may return an order form to school or order pictures online.

**The facility has asked us to change our field trip date, so we will now be going to Ironwoods Challenge Course on Wednesday, September 16th. We apologize for this last minute change. Health and liability forms as well as a sack lunch order form were given to students on Friday afternoon. For this field trip, students will be participating in many team building activities. We will spend the day outdoors, so students need to wear comfortable clothes and tennis shoes. We also recommend students wear or bring sunscreen and bug spray.

Academics

In language arts, we started our first writing project of the year, a personal narrative. Students completed the prewriting and drafting stages of the writing process. Next week, we will work on the editing and revision steps before working to publish a final copy. 

We also completed Wordly Wise Lesson 2 and took a test over the words. Students were assigned Lesson 3, which they are responsible for completing on their own. Wordly Wise is due Thursday, and we will test over the words on Friday. We have added a link to the right side of the blog that will help you access the current week's word list. You can click on "student" and locate our book, which is "Book 5". From there, you can select the correct word list as well as a few helpful review games. 

In reading, both classes reviewed the seven comprehension strategies we will utilize all year. Students made a bookmark that they can use for the remainder of the year in our class novels to help them remember to use these strategies. We also worked on plot mapping. As a class, we reviewed the parts of a plot: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Then, we watched a variety of Pixar short films and identified the parts of the plot in each story line. Next week, each class will begin their class novels. Mrs. Nash's class is reading Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Miss O'Connor's class is reading Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio by Peg Kehret.

In social studies, we reviewed some elements of geography in preparation for our study of U.S. History. Students completed a U.S. Geography Challenge in pairs and worked to identify different land forms and bodies of water in the United States. We also began focusing on absolute and relative location by studying latitude and longitude. Next week we will begin our study of Native Americans. 

In science, we continued working on scientific process skills.  This week we focused on inferring, predicting, and classifying.  Students worked both individually and in groups to make observations, inferences, and predictions from a variety of different pictures and scenarios.  We practiced being able to tell the difference between these 3 process skills, which can be easily confused.  On Friday, we learned about classification and played a game called “Guess My Rule”, where one student would separate a bag of objects into groups based on a certain “rule”.  Their partner would then guess the rule for classification.  We used the same collection of objects a number of times to help us realize that things can be classified in a variety of different ways.