Week of October 15, 2018

Hi All,

We've enjoyed meeting with many of you for conferences this week and we look forward to seeing more of you in the next couple of weeks.  Please remember that your child is invited to this conference.  If you haven't yet filled out the pre-conference survey, it's not too late! Click here to go directly to the survey

We've continued to investigate volume during our math class.  Did you know that approximately 9 1/3 fifth graders can fit into a cubic yard?  It's true.  Students discovered that 27 cubic feet fit into a cubic yard as well.  This was unexpected and bewildering.  Many students initially believe there are 3 cubic feet in a cubic yard since there are 3 feet in a yard.  We will have our first math assessment towards the end of next week as we take a summative look at order of operations, area and volume.

In science this week we reviewed the big concepts we learned in the first half of our magnets and motors unit: opposite poles attract, like poles repel, Earth acts as a large magnet, only metal objects can be magnetic, only nickel, cobalt, and iron can be magnetized. During the second half of the unit we will investigate the relationship between electricity and magnetism.  Initially we will learn how to build a circuit and how to integrate a switch into the circuit.  We will then discover that flowing electrons create a magnetic field.  This is awesome!


We were lucky enough to take part in the first ever Bibliotrek in our library this week.  We were able to choose from many different activities during our trek.  Many students made their own bird journal, several made Samurai family crests using templates and origami paper, and there were many readers happily reading by flashlight on Lumos Lane.  We are grateful to Mrs. Weinrich, Mrs. Stuhr, and Mrs. Castonia for their energy and efforts in creating this activity for us.

We are continuing to write to prompts.  Today the students wrote about a strong emotion. We all thought of strong feelings.  We listed stories of particular times we felt our emotion.  We wrote the beginning of a story today and shared with a partner.

Our Friday poem is about the sun. It has lots of personification in it and it rhymes. (* see the picture below.  ) We all wrote sentences about the sun using personification. :)



















In reading we took notes about the setting in our reader's notebooks.  These lessons involve note taking and gluing... in' just the right spot' on the page. :)  There are also fun pictures to color. The setting is where and when a story takes place.  We discussed that sometimes the setting is not directly stated and the reader must make inferences using clues from the text to determine the setting. We will be writing about the setting in our own novels that we are reading and we will look for clues from the text that tell us more about the setting.

Our read aloud, Animal House and Iz had some turns of events for the main character. Guilt covered Iz like a giant cobweb, clinging, smothering.  How will Iz tell her mother that she prefers to live with her dad and step mom?  Will Jack recover from psittacosis that he got from Elvis, the parrot Iz gave him?  Hmm?  The book has lots and lots of figurative language and twists and turns.

Please continue to have your child read the same book at home and at school.  Bringing books back and forth is imperative.  We want to keep those storylines alive.

The fifth and eighth graders collected 455 pounds of food for the Yarmouth Food Pantry.  We are proud of our responsible and involved citizens.

Key words for stimulating dinner table conversation:

• cubic yard
• Bibliotrek
• How Magnets are Made - video
• psittacosis
• strong emotion writing
• the best part about my current book is...