Grade 5 Explorations: August 27-31

Welcome back to a brand new week! Thanks for checking back in with us!

Notes for the week...

** This Friday we will celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Discovery School with a morning of activities and entertainment! Classes will dismiss early on Friday at 11:45.

** This week we will be transitioning to a new structure in our classes. Ms. Amy will be teaching Writing and Language for both 5A and 5B, while Mr. Andrew will be teaching Math for both sections. Each class will do Reading in their own homerooms, and we will do Science and Social Studies all together.

** While we understand that sometimes travel schedules may conflict with school due to circumstances beyond your control, we ask that families take our school calendar in consideration when making travel plans. Because so much of our learning at Discovery School is experiential, hands-on, and project-centered, it is often difficult for students to make up what they have missed when they are away from class. In addition, because we do a lot of work in collaborative partners, groups, and teams, any student who misses school may be affecting other students that depend on his/her collaboration. If you are not able to avoid your child missing class, we ask that you notify Mr. Andrew or Ms. Amy as far in advance as possible so that we may do our best to make any necessary arrangements. Thank you for your consideration!

** If students are unable to complete homework due to internet connectivity problems or technical issues, we ask parents to please send the homeroom teacher a text, email, or note to verify this. Thank you!

This week in class...

Language Arts

This week in Guided Reading, we will continue reading the novel Bridge to Terabithia while exploring themes, figurative language, and characterizations. We will continue to practice our summarizing skills along with how to have productive class discussions using our Accountable Talk sentence stems. Students will continue reading and conferring about books they have chosen for themselves as well in Self-Selected Reading.

In Writing, we will be finishing up our descriptive writing pieces, and then reviewing the how commas are used to help our writing make sense. We will also practice our new Word Wall Words for the week: meat, knight, whole, probably, usually, especially. A few times a week we revisit these words to practice not only spelling and using the words themselves, but also extending patterns to help with other words as well.

Please note that due to the 25th Anniversary celebration activities on Friday, our Language Arts / Spelling Quiz will be on Thursday this week.

Math

This week students will receive a printed report of their progress during the first week of using Xtramath.org. Students who use Xtramath consistently and with their best effort make great progress with their math fact fluency, and we are already seeing results! Each lesson only takes 5-10 minutes, but this has proven to be very helpful for students in the past, as long as they practice regularly. It is particularly important to strengthen these skills this year before we advance into more complicated multiplication and division concepts.

This week in Math class we will review addition and subtraction using decimals. We will watch a short video together and then have guided practice in class. Students will also be assigned short tutorials in MobyMax which will help them solidify their understanding of this theme and help them practice virtual learning. Students can review how to add and subtract decimals in the first portion of the video below.

Social Studies

This week in Social Studies class we will review landforms and biomes. We will watch several videos and read from a variety of electronic sources. On Thursday the kids will create a Google Slides presentation to demonstrate their understanding.