Welcome to Fifth Grade!

Wow! Can you believe that it is October already?! The beginning of the school year has just flown by!  I apologize that it has taken me so long to get the classroom blog up and running. I had to wait for all the students to return a signed media release form. They are finally all in! I will post to the blog at least once a week. On the blog you will find information about what is going on at school, what is happening in our classroom, and pictures of the students. We have settled into our normal routine and schedule for this year. I want to give you an update of what we are doing in each of the core subjects. 

In math we started the year with a unit on graphing and data. This was a great unit to start the year with because we learned about each other- we graphed personal information such as birthdays, favorite candy, and favorite sport. Now we are in the middle of our first EgageNY unit. This is a place value unit that includes fractions and decimals. On Friday the students learned how to write numbers containing fractions or decimals in standard form, unit form, and expanded form. We are nearing the midway point of this first module, so the students will be taking a quiz on all that they have learned so far at the beginning on next week. 

                                                Fun Friday! Math Games!

In writing we are working on personal narratives, or small moment stories. The first part the of this unit was spent writing multiple flash drafts on different small moments. Now we are in the middle of revising one small moment story. On Thursday we learned that we can make our small moment story better by thinking about the story elements. Students created a story mountain of the events that happened in their story. On Friday we went back to our story  mountain and added the internal story, the thoughts and feelings of characters, to our story mountain.  Adding our thoughts and feelings to our personal narratives makes the story richer and more interesting to our reader.

                  I modeled a story mountain with one of my personal narrative stories

                                                         

                                                        Authors at Work

                                    Kirsten and Georgia have a peer conference

      

  Pictures from a lesson on putting tired adjectives to bed. (Overused words like nice, fun, and mean.)

I need to go take my dog, Rocky, for a walk; he is sitting in front of the door whining. I will post about reading, social studies, and a few beginning of the year activities later today.

Enjoy your Monday! :)