Welcome to week 9! Should be a good week. We are definitely getting into the thick part of our curriculum so you might see more work coming home to be finished. Keep checking those planners and asking your kids what they need to complete!
Last week in reading we finished reading Maniac Magee. This week, students will begin novel studies. They will be reading another realistic fiction book and working on the same reading comprehension strategies as before. Students will be asked to read at home for homework and come prepared to discuss and answer questions about what they read the night before. Please help your student to get the reading done each night and bring the book back to school. If they are not prepared, they will slow down the entire group, which is not fair to those who are staying on top of their work. In addition to implementing the reading strategies we practiced as a whole class, students will also be working on how to answer questions completely. In order for an answer to be considered complete students must: 1. write in complete sentences using correct punctuation and capitalization. 2. provide evidence from the text to support their answer. 3. answer all parts of a question. Students will receive direct instruction as to what this will look like and how they can tackle a question. We will also be giving students feedback constantly throughout their novel studies regarding their answers. They will be expected to read the feedback and correct mistakes as they have been doing in math.
In writing this week, students are working on revising their drafts. We are working on how to help a partner think critically about their own writing and make improvements. It is very hard for 5th graders to revise because their writing is so personal. By working with a partner, we are teaching students to step back from their work and think about how someone else reads their story differently than they do. We will also be working on word choice: specifically how to replace over used words such as "said", "nice" and "bad". Students will have one writing homework assignment this week which will be to create a "clean" copy of their draft. This will require students to rewrite their draft, including all of the changes they have made to their work. They need to bring both their first draft and this clean draft back to school.
In math this week we will be taking a pre-test on our multiplication unit and with the results we will do a little peer instruction to fill any holes. On Thursday we will begin our next chapter which will be dividing by one-digit divisors. The kids have been working hard on their multiplication facts. Keep it up! Those facts will be increasingly important as we move into division and soon into long division (two chapters from now).
We will be starting our first science unit of the year this week. This first unit will be based around landforms. Students will be learning how landforms are created, learn what a system is and how the parts of a system are so important to the results of the system. In addition, students will begin an investigation into erosion and its affects on land.
That's it for now. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Allyn and Alaina
No comments:
Post a Comment