Weekly Update

Happy snow day! It is absolutely beautiful outside. This former Florida girl will admit that winter is one of my favorite seasons. I think the world looks so beautiful and peaceful covered in a blanket of snow. (That being said, I hope we do not have too many snow days this year!)  I hope everyone had a great weekend! I had a  fun, but busy, weekend filled with birthday celebrations, soccer, and a chorus performance. Take a few minutes to read and find out what has been going on in our classroom.

This week in reading workshop we continued with our non-fiction unit. In read aloud and in guided reading we have been reading non-fiction articles related to the history of our country. As we read these articles we have been practicing annotating. The skill of annotating non-fiction texts is a valuable skill to have when students are reading to research a topic for a paper or essay. We have also been focusing on finding the main idea and supporting details. At the beginning week we focused on finding the main idea of individual sections, or chunks of the texts. We ended the week by finding the main idea of the whole article. This week we will continue our work with main idea and supporting details by finding multiple main ideas in the same text.

 Students Work With a Partner to Find the Main Idea

In math we finished our module on division and students took a division assessment. We started our unit on fractions by finding equivalent fractions and adding fractions with like denominators.

In writer's workshop we are continued with our poetry unit. We went outside to observe an object and wrote down observations about our object. After that, we  wrote about our object in a poetic way using figurative language such as similes, metaphors, and personification. Students also worked on revising the poems that they wrote by looking at word choice, stanzas and line breaks. This week will begin using the Chromebooks to type our poems and put together our poetry anthology.

Students Writing Down their Observations

In science we finished the sound portion of our Light and Sound unit. We ended this part of the unit with an engineering design challenge. Students had to use what they know about sound and how sound travels to create a pair of noise reducing headphones. Partners worked together to choose materials, design the headphones, create their design, and finally, test out how well their headphones worked. After the challenge students reflected on how well their design worked and what they would do differently if they could do the project over. It was interesting to me to see how the different partnerships went about designing their headphones. Some partners measured all their material exactly and were very precise. While others just crammed as much of the different materials into their headphones as they could. I was surprised by the  choice of materials. I thought that foam would be the most popular material, in reality, the most popular material was the fiberfill. The partners worked well together and all the headphones were able to reduce the noise. Students said the hardest part of the challenge was getting the headphones to stay on their head!

We ended the week by meeting with our kindergarten buddies. Students read two books with their kindergarten buddies. Then they helped their buddy identify what happened at the beginning of the book, what happened in the middle, and what happened at the end of the book. I love watching our fifth graders work with the kindergartners, it is amazing to watch them transform into positive role models for the kindergartners.

Have a great week!