October 9, 2008
Dear Fifth Grade Parents,
Next week will be a very busy week! The fifth graders will be sponsoring the prayer service on Friday, October 17th. We hope you will all attend at 8:30am in the school hall. Thursday, October 16th is Red Ribbon Day at Holy Rosary. We will have many important visitors at Holy Rosary that day. Please have your child wear PERFECT UNIFORM both October 16 & 17.
I will be keeping math, social studies, and religion work for your childs portfolio. They will be choosing work from their portfolio specific papers to share at conferences. The conferences will be student lead.
Here is a brief curriculum update for the following week:
Math
Friday: Lesson 20, Three Ways to Show Division
Monday: Test #3
Tuesday: Investigation #2
Wednesday: Lesson 21,Problems About Equal Groups
Thursday: No Math
Friday: Lesson 22, One-digit Division with a Remainder.
Religion
We have begun Chapter 2 in our texts. Students wrote a prayer or a poem in class this week about what they love about Gods creation/environment. Next week, we will be very busy during religion class practicing for our prayer service on Friday 17th. We will also be using religion class time next week to prepare for conferences.
Language Arts
Students write descriptive paragraphs. We learn to revise work, looking to improve word choice and sentence fluency. Students have been given a study guide for next weeks test. It is also available on my web page http://www.holyrosaryws.org/Specialists/LanguageArts5. Students can also access several practice worksheets to help them prepare for the grammar portion of the test. Also, look for some links to fun websites that review these basic parts of speech. 5B students will take their test on Wednesday, October 15th and 5A students will take their test on Thursday, October 16th.
This weeks spelling assignment is due on Monday. Our spelling test will be on Monday, also.
Science
Students continue to discuss their daily observation of the moon.
Students created models in class to show what solar and lunar eclipses look like. Students will take at test next Tuesday (10/14) based on the notes on astronomy in their 5-sub and Chapter 4, lesson 1 in their text. Students will review the concepts in class to help them prepare for the test.
Next, students will learn how the sun compares with other stars and how scientists measure distances in space.
Reading
This week 5th graders have been learning about the relationship between Cause and Effect. Weve talked about how understanding cause and effect relationships can help us to become better readers. We have applied this target skill to the story in our reader, Meeting Mr. Henry, as well as to our individual book report books.
The next mini due-date for our Book Reports is Oct. 27th, which is when students should have finished reading their Newbery book. I am hearing some very enthusiastic comments about the books!
Social Studies
Tomorrow the fifth graders will take the Lesson 2 test, Native Americans and their Land. I encourage them to reread the chapter, know the Hopi Origin story, practice on the on-line test as well as study the vocabulary and notes from the Interactive Notebook.
Next week we will begin Lesson 3, Native American Cultural Regions. In this lesson students will be able to list seven cultural regions into which scholars often divide Native Americans. They will be able to identify selected environmental factors that promoted cultural diversity among Native American groups. Lastly, they will be able to describe selected examples of cultural adaptations made by the Kwakiutl, Pomo, Hopi, Yakima, Algonquin, and Seminole tribes. Activity: Students will read the chapter in small groups and use an annotated map to record information about cultural adaptations made by groups from each region. Then they will look at numerous artifacts to decide which environment those objects belong.
Ms. Semandiris