Week of January 2

Happy New Year!


We would like to thank you so much for supporting us with your children. Together we are helping them to become self-directed motivated learners!

The students have a Gift of Self assignment to be completed by January 25.  They have been asked to give two hours of their time to help others.  A gift of time or kindness can make the world a better place. This should be above and beyond their normal chores or responsibilities.  This is a chance to practice good citizenship.  The students will have a reflective writing assignment they will complete in language arts class.  In the past, we have had students do a variety of activities for this assignment. Some have baked cookies for the police officers, others have walked dogs at the dog shelter, and many have volunteered in their elementary teacher's class room. Please help your child choose what ever fits best for them.  Thank you.

In reading this week we learned new vocabulary from Wolf Hollow, our read aloud. Some of our new words are: incorrigible, belfry, constable, hooligan, and mishap. The students enjoyed a book talk about one of my favorite authors, Carl Hiaason.  I highly recommends Flush, Scat, Hoot, Chomp, and his most recent novel, Squirm. Carl delivers wildly entertaining novels involving snakes, grizzlies, bullies, scary teachers that go missing, and more!  We talked about the settings of his books, which take place in southern Florida and the Florida Everglades.  Hiaason creates fun and very unique main and supporting main characters.  There are always two leading characters - one boy and one girl.  The two characters work together throughout the story. I enjoy how he introduces a few interesting story strands at the beginning of his novels, and as the plot unravels, he has a very clever way in which he wraps it all up.
In writing we talked about persuasive essays.  We are brainstorming some ideas for our own essays that we will begin writing next week. The students watched the news clip about a persuasive letter a 9-year-old wrote to Stephen Curry.  Her letter prompted both Curry and Under Armour to add the basketball sneakers she wanted to their girls' line. We read aloud an essay written about the benefits of automatic hand dryers, and we discussed what we noticed about the style and set up.

We'd like to congratulate Antonio, Josh, Joe, and Emma who competed in our fifth grade spelling bee today.

In math class today we visited with our friends Fizz and Martina.  We used our problem solving skills with these friends to continue working on explaining our mathematical thinking.  Students also must use their calculation skills and get practice writing number models.  This was the last episode of this series of Project Sphinx.  Our next series with Fizz and Martina is called Lights, Camera, Fractions!  It will focus on how to model with fractions.

Conversation starters:
incorrigible
She has a heart of gold.
croach heads
without using numbers, explain