September 12, 2013

September 12. 2013

Dear Fifth Grade Parents,

We have had a great week in 5A! Tomorrow we have our opening school Mass. We hope you join us at Mass at 8:45am.

The following is a curriculum update for the week of 9/16-9/19.

Reminders:

9/13 – Mass 8:45am

9/20 – No School- Teacher In-service

Sell Magazines!!!!!

Religion

We are working on Chapter 1, Longing for God. In this chapter students will examine the importance of material goods vs. things that we need that money can’t buy. Students will be learning that having a relationship with God is the way to true happiness.

Math

9/16 Monday-Lesson 4, Representing Decimals pp. 29-34

9/17 Tuesday-Lesson 5, Understanding Place Value (Hands On) pp. 37-42

9/18 Wednesday- Lesson 6, Place Value Through Thousandths pp. 43-48

9/19 Thursday- Lesson 7, Compare Decimals pp. 55-60

Social Studies

The fifth graders are busy learning about Lesson 1, The Geography of the United States.  Students will work in pairs to complete their Interactive Notebooks in class for Maps A-D. There is also an on-line study guide for this lesson. This is located on the right hand side of my web-page under the word HISTORY ALIVE! Just click on it and then select the correct lesson in this case it is Lesson 1.

Students will be able to:

Label:

  • 4 Hemispheres
  • Compass Rose
  • Equator
  • Prime Meridian
  • 7 Continents
  • 4 Oceans
  • Using: latitude/Longitude to find locations on the Earth’s surface
  • Define and be able to locate on a map: 14 geographical terms, (bay,ocean,peninsula..)

Language Arts

This week students were busy writing a pre-assessment piece about themselves. This pre-assessment will generate a base from which the students will grow from throughout the year. Students will be starting to gain an understanding of Ideas, one of the Six Traits of Writing. Next week, we will begin our studies in Language Arts by discussing and reviewing: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Students will be receiving Spelling Words every Tuesday and will have a spelling test on the following Tuesday. Please be on the look out for these words and remind your student to study for their test.  On Thursday, September 26th, students will have a test on nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Reading

Next week 5th graders will receive their first AoW! (Article of the Week) These informational articles are assigned on the first day of the week and due back on the last day of the week. Students will be performing what is called a Close Reading of the text. We have spent much of this week breaking down this process which involves identifying the confusing parts of the article, taking notes about the important points, and writing a short reflection.

Science

Students will learn how to conduct controlled experiments by experimenting with variables that do and do not affect the behavior of pendulums they have built in class. They will graph their results in a variety of ways and use their graphs to predict the behavior of different lengths of pendulums they construct. Students will take a quiz based on their experiences with pendulums (also called swingers) and vocabulary notes take in their 5-subject notebooks on Tuesday 9/24).