January 2023

Hi Parents, 

We had green grass during our break in December and now... here comes the snow.  Tomorrow the students will be participating in the glow run at Harrison Middle School. Please wear the same attire as you would for gym class. The students need to wear boots to walk to HMS and carry their sneakers.This Friday we are planning on visiting the residents at Bay Square. We plan to leave right after lunch/recess at 1:55. We will be walking back to school at 2:30 on the Elizabeth Condon trail. 

As a part of the Glow Run fundraiser, Molly had enough sales to silly string Mr. Wheeler! They had SNOW MUCH FUN!

It is an awesome time to be a fifth-grader, and we still have so much time together!

The Olympics

social studies colonies

Our idiom of the week - Don't open a can of worms.

Our vocabulary word of the week - motive

Class read aloud Rules by Cynthia Lord

In language arts we are working on letter writing and persuasive essays. In our letter writing unit, the students are writing letters to a person of their choice. You can click on this link to the choice board. We are addressing envelops and sending the letters from school. Thank you for helping your child with this by providing the address to the person(s) to whom they are writing. 

Students wrote a practice essay about chocolate milk being allowed in schools. We read three articles about the many health benefits chocolate milk has, and we also read about the amount of sugar the milk contains. Students have formed their own opinions and are writing their own persuasive essays about their thoughts on whether or not chocolate milk should be or should not be in schools. The students will be selecting their own topics and writing persuasive essays. We have been working on strong leads, using specific transition words, and how to include specific supporting detail in our body paragraphs.

On Fridays we continue our work with poetry. Recently, we have written two different styles of poems; both used color as the subject. 

color poetry

  

winter idioms

Reading nightly continues to be an expectation for the students. Our class read aloud, Rules, explores what it is like living with someone who sees the world so differently than we do. Students are completing an assignment about their own called 5 Looks on a Book.

Winter is finally upon us. I hope you’ve had a chance to get out and enjoy the weather and that your fifth-grader has too. It’s been a while since we last blogged and we have been able to accomplish so much. In math we diligently worked our way through unit two, multiplied and divided with the best of them, and had a great chance to show what we knew with the unit assessment. Students rocked this unit, and carried great momentum into unit three. Unit three focuses on fractions, and the unit three parent letter will be sent home this week. It outlines a bit more specifically what the unit focuses on, and also what you can do at home to support your learner. 

In Social Studies students have established colonies, worked together to come up with ground rules, drawn flags, cooperatively built shelters, and some have even planted seeds. We have also had difficult conversations regarding some of the consequences of colonization, especially in early America. Over the next few weeks we will dive into the early days of the 13 Colonies, and the pre-revolutionary history of America!