Another snow day! We were going to be busy yesterday, so we'll have some catching up to do.
We'll have to reschedule library or wait until next Wednesday to begin our next at-home book project. For this month, each student will research a scientist or inventor, using both print and electronic resources. Their presentation about their inventor can be a timeline, a Prezi, Powerpoint, video, or some other project that tells about the life, challenges, and accomplishments of the chosen person. We will be sharing print resources with the other 5th grades, so students will not be signing biographies out of the library. We'll use the books during our library time. Monday is the school district's mid-year Math exam. We'll be reviewing work from the beginning of the year and reteaching items missed on Tuesday
0 Comments
Wow! We have had cabin fever, so having some new events and units in our schedule will help keep us from going too stir crazy. First, we got out some more board games and activities to do when we have indoor recess, including a parachute, which was great fun to play with in the hallway.
We are also bringing some teachers into the classroom from the outside world. Officer Tamborelli, the Mom of one of our fifth grade students, is also the DARE officer for the Ithaca City Police Department. She is coming in on Tuesdays and Thursdays to teach us decision-making skills, especially around peer pressure and tough choices. Students have workbooks and work in the class - which may be done as homework or during morning or RTI (extra) time. Students will culminate the program by writing an essay. Stephen Anderson collaborated with poet Sarah Wolff to get an IPEI grant to do a special literacy project in each of the 5th grades. The project is titled "All Of Us Singing". Its aim is to enrich our student's literary lives through poetry. Ten workshops with the talented poet Sarah Wolff will culminate with students creating a published piece of poetry and a community reading of their poem. Today was our second session, and we wrote transformation poems based on the work of international poets. We have begun new reading groups based on the books Bud, Not Buddy, Maniac Magee, and The Great Gilly Hopkins. All three realistic fiction books feature young people searching for a place to call home. OUr writing unit is on argument-based opinion essays. OUr first experience in the unit is to research and come up with an opinion about whether the school should serve chocolate milk. Children are taking notes on materials both for and against the ban. In Science, we are studying Simple Machines. Our next long-term project will be to study a scientist or inventor, and either create a Rube Goldberg machine using simple machines, or design an invention to solve a problem or perform a task (this does not have to work, but should be a unique idea). Details will come home next week. Survival kit projects are due on Thursday. Please do not bring them in early. Thank you. Students will begin oral presentations of their projects next Monday. We'll pick presentation dates tomorrow. The best news today is that Heather is back from Kenya. We are looking forward to hearing more about her travels.
In Art we are on our final copy of our one point perspective drawing. We are drawing rooms. We had math groups, dividing fractions by whole numbers. Today we practiced drawing our own graphic organizers for informational writing. Tomorrow, we will have our writing assessment. We started new book group books today: Bud, Not Buddy, Maniac Magee, and The Great Gilly Hopkins. In the afternoon, we presented our Latin American projects in Mr. Anderson's room. Apologies for the convergence of due dates - Mr. Anderson's project was due at a certain spot in our rotations, and coincidentally hit the same due date as our two paragraphs for our Survival project. As a result, we have not had Math homework yesterday or today.
We have been working on multiplying fractions by fractions during the week, and are good at drawing an area model to show this operation, as well as using numbers to get an answer. Today we explored what it means to divide a whole number by a unit fraction (a fraction with one in the numerator) by drawing bar models and number lines. The students did an amazing job of focusing on their writing today while finishing, editing, and copying an essay about how the character Esperanza changed, especially in her response to challenges, throughout the novel Esperanza Rising. It is good to be back with a full week ahead of us in this new year. Between vacation and snow/cold days and guest teachers due to Ms. Belle's absence last week, things have been a bit uneven. We're reclaiming our routines, habits and focus for the challenging work ahead.
Physical education was great fun today, with the apparatus set up in a darkened gymnasium. Ask a student about the story behind their obstacle course this year. In Math, we are working hard to understand the multiplication of fractions by making area models. Students learn to draw taking a part of a part to give them a visual basis to understand the operation itself. We are tackling some tricky bar-modeling problems, and although not all students can do them independently, we are all understanding the steps as we do some of them together. Many adults would be hard pressed to solve the problems we are tackling. Our culminating activity for our Esperanza Rising/Human Rights unit is an essay we have been working on this week. Students are using information from the text to explain challenges that Esperanza faced during the book, and how her responses to these challenges show what kind of a person she is. The essay will serve as a good snapshot of student writing, and will be evaluated, discussed, and sent home. We are taking a brief pause in our blogging to regroup with some writing lessons before posting more blogs. In the meantime, we are focusing on improving the last set of submitted blogs and commenting on each other's pieces. We hope to find a class to pair with, perhaps in another country, so we can have a wider audience for our blogs. Students are working with Mr. Anderson to study Latin American geography. They have a project due this Friday. Tomorrow is our bowl-a-thon fundraiser. We hope to have fun as we earn money! We talked about immigration in Music and related it to our novel, Esperanza Rising, and Irishmen.
Math-time brought the application of the skill of multiplying fractions by a whole number to converting measurements to different-sized units. Students are working on ideas for their next blog posts. Many students are starting to have themes, but some students are changing topics regularly. We are all expected to comment on each others' posts. We had some very sophisticated discussions about the big metaphors and themes in Esperanza Rising. Students were excited to get a new option, writing a crossword puzzle, for their vocabulary work this week. They should still gather words of interest from their reading and our schoolwork. Directions about how to use a website to do this are on the ELA>Vocabulary page of this website. Today was our first afternoon in Mr. Anderson's room, learning about Latin American geography. The school made a lovely banner for the family of our former library clerk, Mrs. Margaret Haring, who passed away over the holiday. The children had fond memories to express and were kind enough to think about how hard Mrs. Haring's death will be on Ms. Ball, who worked with her for so many years in the library. I reminded them that they may need or want to talk with someone about their sadness or memories, and that we have people available, including me, who will make time for those important conversations if they let us know. Parents can also communicate with the school if they think their child needs counseling over this loss. I will be out of school for a portion of the day t It was lovely to see folks this morning, with snowflakes and smiles on their faces! We were missing 5 students, so we had quite an intimate-sized group.
In PE, students helped to put the mats out for the tumbling unit for the whole school, with lots of muscle and teamwork involved. We reviewed our Fractions test, making corrections and doing some remedial work. Some students worked in small groups with adults. Several students were assigned instructional videos to watch and extra practice to follow on Learn Zillion, through Edmodo. Others worked on the Kahn Academy website to get some extension work right at their level. We chose Survival-themed books for our next book project, which will be creating a survival kit for the main character(s) of the book. Students should have 2 weeks to finish their books before beginning their project, which is due at the end of the month. Project details will be posted and come home soon. We took some time for students to respond to each other's blog posts today. Students also worked on grammar through an Edmodo app called No Red Lines. The program creates sentences to correct based on students' interests. We are working on subject/verb agreement. At the end of the day we shared some sad news. Students are bringing home an informational letter to share with families, and we will talk together as a class community again the next time we see each other. Stunts and tumbling! We added things to jump off. At the end we had a cheese mat that looks like a triangle.
The Math test went okay. Most of us have all of our fix-ups done in Math. We did our poems for each other and used a protocol to help each other make them even better. We will be performing them tomorrow. Excitement! We got our BOWL-A-THON pledge sheets today. We need to raise money for our big trip!! Another ePortfolio day! We learned to label our artifacts and describe what they show about our progress and learning..
We began our shelves of books on the online book log called Biblionasium. Students get to pick their own avatars when they get 8 finished books. They can access this from home. We did not do rotations today. We did get to work with a partner on our two-voice poems based on two characters from Esperanza Rising. We will perform this work in class on Friday. We reviewed our fraction work for a test tomorrow. We talked about Beethoven and sang holiday songs in Music. We began tumbling in PE today.
We are looking forward to Friday, when anyone who is caught up with work will get to do fun activities with other classes. In Art club kids made great snowflakes and lace snowflakes. We're writing two-voice poems about |
AuthorThis blog has (almost) daily posts about our shenanigans and hard work. We post together at the end of the school day. Archives
June 2014
Categories |