November 19th

*Written by the students in room 14.

We have had a full week this week.  For diversity week, the whole school colored butterflies to show diversity.  We are all different. We all wore orange today to show our unity.  We are all different at WLE but we are also all the same.  On Wednesday, we watched the Kid President Pep Talk.  Click on the link below to see the video.  On Friday, we will work with a first grade class to create a kaleidoscope.   Ask your 5th grader about diversity week.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-gQLqv9f4o


Kaleidoscope Activity with 1st Grade

In Writers' Workshop we have been working on creating Tall Tales.  Tall Tales are stories that are exaggerated but not fantasy.  For example, a baby could do something that an adult can do and as the baby gets older his or her powers increase.  As we finish each paragraph of our Tall Tale we are editing and publishing with illustrations.  Ask your 5th grader about his or her Tall Tale.  


In Readers' Workshop we have been using our meta-cognition. We been thinking about our thinking as we are reading.  We are working on organizing our thinking on sticky notes or in our Readers' Notebooks.  We have also been working on finding our word study word chunks in our reading.  This helps us to understand new vocabulary.  


In Math, we prepared for and took our second benchmark assessment (BA).  This took a long time!  We are going to start unit 3 today.  

In Social Studies, we worked on our BA Review and played a Jeopardy game to prepare for our BA.  We took our first BA in class today.  WE LOVE SOCIAL STUDIES!


In Science, we have been working with mixtures and solutions.  We have done several experiments with mixtures and solutions.


We had our student council election this week. Our class representatives are Joey and Dior.  Congratulations to everyone who participated in the election.  

November 5th

This has been the best week of weather we have had all school year.  Who would have though it would come in November.  Even with this wonderful weather, we have been working hard in the classroom.

In Readers' Workshop we have been working on articulating our theories as we are reading and supplying evidence for our thinking.  We have been working on ways to organize our ideas using our reader's notebooks, sticky notes, and conversations.  We have also been working on prompts for productive classroom discussions.  We are working on listening to what our classmates say and building on each others' thinking.  See the chart below with a list of our conversation prompts.

In Writers' Workshop we have been finishing up our memoirs.  We have also started a genre study on Tall Tales.  We have read several Tall Tales and we are charting the characteristics we notice as we read.  Soon we will be writing our own Tall Tales.

                    

In Science this week, we have been preparing for our first Benchmark Assessment.  We took our first BA today.  

In Social Studies we reviewed Columbus, Pizarro, and Cortes and determined which was the worst conquistador.  Ask your fifth grader which conquistador he or she thought was the worst.  Then we studied French explorers.  This week we studied Giovanni da Verrazanno, Fransisco Pizarro, and Jacques Cartier.  

Math was a challenge this week.  The 5th graders were introduced to traditional division. We have done division in three ways (area model, partial quotients, and traditional).  Please practice division at home!

Boo Bash/Fun Run and Halloween