Week of September 9

Happy Friday!

Thanks again to all of you who were able to attend open house.  We enjoyed seeing you all.

Looking ahead -

Our visit to Bay Square will be on October 4.  We'll be sending an email about the specifics as the date gets closer.

Our walk to the Food Pantry will be on Wednesday, October 9.  There will be more details soon about this.

Reminder -Please make sure that the Reader's Timeline is filled for class on Tuesday.

Activities -
Homework Club is every Wednesday after school 2:45 -3:15 in the fifth grade wing.  Students can take the YES bus home

Intramurals - Wednesdays 2:45 -4:15 gym

Math team - Thursdays  2:45 -4:15 Mr. Smith's room

Writing Club -fourth Tuesday of every month in Ms. Agell's room

Student Leadership Team - Thursdays library 7:15 -7:50 Mr. Gross

Science Club ( Hasn't started )

Reading -

We finished our first read aloud - Be a Perfect In Just Three Days.  The students did a nice job sketching the very silly author, Dr. Pinkerton Silverfish. We learned that, like Milo, you should be brave and face your fear.  Also, with a little grit or 'stick-to-it-iveness' when you think something is nearly impossible ... you'll be able to stick to it and get it done because you really wanted to.  Finally, no one is perfect!  Perfect is never doing anything wrong. Perfect is boring.  It's important to be a good person and try your best. Good people are hard to find and they are a lot more fun than perfect people any day of the week.

We began our One Book One School, A Night Divided by Jennifer A. Nielsen.  Students listened to chapters one through three. We watched a short,  a kid friendly video about the cold war.  The students were gallery walking detectives.  We viewed 7 pictures from the book and made observations and charted what they noticed and what we are wondering.

Daily Oral Language -We have been successful with our first week of writing mini lessons.  In DOL, we write out the date, work on grammar and punctuation, and practice notebook set up.  we also write our own sentences using the vocabulary word of the week and idiom of the week.

Lessons Milo learned each day.

Dr. Silverfish

Gallery walk

  

In math this week we learned about exponents.  This is brand new learning for many students.  Many students confuse 4² with 4 X 2.   4²= 4 x 4, while 4 x 2 = 4 + 4.  Exponents are repeated multiplication.  Multiplication is repeated addition.  This will continue to be confusing for some students. We will have lots of chances to review and practice.  

Now that we’ve learned about exponents, we are ready to learn something that will change our lives forever!  We will learn about order of operations!  Hooray!  Until this point, problems have always been written for students so that the problems followed the correct order of operations.  For the rest of their lives students will have to use order of operations when they are solving equations.   I learned this as "Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally," but the new generation knows this as "Please excuse my detention after school."  Boy, times have changed!  This new knowledge allows us to solve more complex problems and allows us to use math to model more complex situations.  PEMDAS never takes a vacation.

A quick refresher when solving equations:

     P: parentheses and brackets are done first

       E: exponents next

         MD: then multiplication or division, whichever comes first working left to right

           AS: and finally addition or subtraction, whichever comes first working left to right

Conversation Starters:

A Night Divided

colossal

It's raining cats and dogs

Gallery Walk
Mistakes help you learn
Exponents
Brains