This Week in Room 33! Sept. 16-20

One message in school that we are always focusing on is having a growth mindset! The above image is an example of how to change our thinking from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. You may have heard some quotes from your students that we use in class→  "When you're done, you've only just begun!" or "We learn from our mistakes!" and "It's okay to fail- that's how we get better!" There is ALWAYS room to grow and room for improvement- this is just another reason why we always set goals and WORK to achieve them!

The following is a BIG question we are exploring, discussing, and trying to answer in 5th grade as we continue our read aloud of Home of the Brave and express our opinions in our next literary essays/book club conversations. We will also celebrate Constitution Day on Tuesday with breakout sessions on topics including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Government branches, and the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. Encourage your student to continue the discussion with YOU at home!

How can we celebrate diversity and welcome refugees & immigrants into our community? 

This week in 5th grade...

ELA:  This week we are beginning our work on having meaningful and thoughtful discussions within our book clubs. Students are expected to be reading up to their group's stopping point each day/night so they are prepared to be an important contributor within their book club discussions. 

In our literary essay unit, students will be working to write a strong thesis statement about one or more of these picture books. They will also collect evidence such as quotes from the text and retell parts of the text to support their claim all while organizing their sentences within a 5 paragraph essay structure. 

STEAM: We are wrapping up our study of Ch. 2 (Multiplying Whole Numbers) this week as we are multiplying 3-digit numbers by 1-digit and 2-digit numbers. We will end our unit with a final real world project in which students will build and outfit their own resort utilizing their multiplication skills! 

***It is SO IMPORTANT that your student knows their basic multiplication facts. Please quiz your child and have them practice in ALEKS (QuickTables) or try this site→ MATH MAGICIAN. Thank you for all your hard work at home- it REALLY pays off! 

In science, we are working hard to understand the process of photosynthesis all while continuing to revise and create our own pizza farm model from our new learning. Feel free to ask your student to give you a tour of their Google Classrooms and Google Drive because we are using these every day to record and show our work in all subject areas!

This Week in Room 33! Sept. 9-12

 

I am looking forward to our parent-teacher intake conferences this Tuesday and Thursday.  Be sure to sign up for a time slot or check out your scheduled time using THIS LINK! 

To prepare for this parent-led conference, please click HERE for a survey (answers are only shared with me). We can use these questions to guide our discussion. 

The following is a BIG question we are exploring, discussing, and trying to answer in 5th grade as we continue our read aloud of Home of the Brave and express our opinions in our next literary essays/book club conversations. Encourage your student to continue the discussion with YOU at home!

How can we celebrate diversity and welcome refugees & immigrants into our community? 

This week in 5th grade…

STEAM: We are continuing our 2nd chapter this week on multiplying whole numbers with a focus on prime factorization, powers & exponents, multiplication patterns, problem solving using a table, and multiplying using partial products and the distributive property. This will be a QUICK chapter, as multiplication is mostly a REVIEW from 4th grade. Keep working on those basic multiplication facts at home! 

Also in STEAM, we are continuing our science lessons in the unit From Sun to Food by wrapping up our bean and sprouter investigations as we answer the question, “How do growing conditions affect bean growth?” We will also begin to answer the question, “What happens to plants after they die?” with a decomposition investigation. 

ELA: Wow! We are doing some deep thinking and hard work in ELA! We are learning that we need our brains on FULL POWER to really dig deep into our independent books. Reading can be SO MUCH MORE than just reading at the surface level if we put our mind to it!

We are beginning books clubs this week! Students will be working hard on reading pages and pages of their book club books by following their reading assignments they create for class reading time and for reading at home. We will be working on having meaningful, supportive, and thoughtful book club discussions- ask your student for different discussion sentence starters they are trying at school and encourage them at home as well!

In ELA, we are also beginning our second literary essay.  Each student will be closely reading and analyzing a picture book in which they will write their essay on. We will be choosing strong thesis statements and finding evidence in the form of quotes and analysis of craft to prove our thesis. 

  

This Week in Room 33! Sept. 3-6

Parents, 

Don’t forget to sign up for your parent-teacher “intake” conference using THIS LINK! To prepare for this parent-led conference, please click HERE for a survey (answers are only shared with me). We can use these questions to guide our discussion. I truly appreciate all of the information you give, so we can work together to better meet your child’s needs this school year! 

What is an intake conference?

An opportunity to- gain useful information about students from parents, establish partnerships, set goals for the school year, allow one-to-one communication

How do you prepare for this conference?

Think about your students- strengths, opportunities for growth, interests, motivators, how do these areas impact your child’s learning and interactions with peers?

Here's what to expect this week in 5th grade…

STEAM: Important note about math assessments→  Instead of assigning a rather large and lengthy formative assessment at the end of a chapter or unit, we are breaking the former “test” down into progress checks. Each “check-in” is usually given at the end of a school week and typically consists of about 5 problems. Our intention is that the progress check will only include skills taught that week, that the assessment should be completed pretty quickly (usually about 15 minutes), and as the material is fresh, hopefully completed with ease. These progress checks are then assessed, students are given an opportunity to meet with the teacher to discuss their learning, and most importantly, I use the data to meet with students the following week to continue to review the skills that were missed. We find that the students seem to improve much more quickly this way, and that overall the students are more relaxed instead of little balls of stress on a test day. Students will also be assessed periodically with independent projects that will cover math skills taught in a real-world and more authentic problem solving setting.

As a reminder→  students are ALWAYS encouraged to use their textbook at home for extra practice if they feel they need it in a certain area as a way to feel more prepared for these assessments. Students will be responsible for showing YOU their weekly assessment scores by logging into their Google account and going to their Gmail inbox. I will send a Remind text when they are available to view. When looking at these assessments, encourage your child to explain to you what they missed and what they have learned from their mistakes, rather than focusing on the point values.

This week we are beginning Chapter 2- Multiplying Whole Numbers.  We will practice prime factorization and talk about powers and exponents. It will be important to make sure your child knows his/her basic multiplication facts as we move forward!

ELA: We are working really hard on our goals to read more than EVER before this year! We have also been learning that it is not only about VOLUME but about the QUALITY of our reading- our metacognition (thinking about our thinking!) We are showing our deep thinking about our books by using our ELA notebooks. This week we are learning to think analytically and taking a closer look at our characters and their struggles. We will utilize all of these skills as we complete our first literary essay on the Panyee Football Club short documentary.

Please CONNECT with our classroom→ 

Facebook: @MrsSchaefers5thGradeClass

Remind 101: text @sch533 to 81010 to sign up! 

Class Blog: schaefer5th.blogspot.com

This Week in Room 33! Aug. 26-30

 

Parents, 

Please sign up for your parent-teacher “intake” conference using THIS LINK! Please read the following from Dr. Moehlmann’s Principal News e-Note. To prepare for this parent-led conference, please click HERE for a survey (answers are only shared with me). We can use these questions to guide our discussion. I truly appreciate all of the information you give, so we can work together to better meet your child’s needs this school year! 

The first six weeks of the year are crucial as we build relationships and develop communities in our classrooms and school. Parents and family members are highly important to this process, and we are excited to invite you in to participate in our INTAKE parent/teacher conference format on Thursday, September 10th and 12th from 4:00-7:00 p.m. These intake conferences are our opportunity to learn from YOU, as the experts, about your child. The conversations will support our home-school partnership and further develop the two-way communication that is so important to our collective efforts with Lindbergh students.

What is an intake conference?

An opportunity to- gain useful information about students from parents, establish partnerships, set goals for the school year, allow one-to-one communication

How do you prepare for this conference?

Think about your students- strengths, opportunities for growth, interests, motivators, how do these areas impact your child’s learning and interactions with peers?

What to expect this week in 5th grade...

STEAM: We are so excited to begin our first science unit, “From Sun to Food”, AND continue our first unit on place value this week. Students will work on creating Seesaw videos showing their learning, participate in small group instruction, and will be work in ALEKS (our individualized online program that will roll out starting in September) within our math workshop. We will be... 

• Representing fractions as decimals and decimals as fractions 
• Writing both fractions and decimals in word form 
• Comparing decimals using greater than, less, than, or equal to symbols 

Our overall goal in math this week will be becoming comfortable with place value from the millions, down to the thousandths.

ELA: This week we will really focus on WRITING about our reading! We will use our ELA notebooks to help us push the level of our reading and thinking. We will try to snap our work every so often in Seesaw! We are kicking off our first writing unit (literary essays) by watching a short video clip about a football (soccer) team and the hardships they overcame during their journey to success.  As we watch the video clip, we will be practicing our research skills by pulling out important information and writing it down as we watch. We will be emphasizing the difference between scribbling down notes after reading (or viewing VS. BEGINNING our research with the goal of writing something down in mind.  Our class will learn how to recognize great evidence when we see it and use it to prove our point!

Please CONNECT with our classroom→ 

Facebook: @MrsSchaefers5thGradeClass

Remind 101: text @sch533 to 81010 to sign up! 
Class Blog: schaefer5th.blogspot.com

This Week in Room 33! Aug. 19-23

Happy 1st full week of school! I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend and had wonderful things to say about their first 2 days of school last week. I cannot wait to continue getting to know everyone- we have such as AWESOME class of 5th grade leaders!

This year in 5th grade, we are excited to continue working towards a blended learning environment with 2 large blocks of time in our schedule to provide a more authentic and engaging learning experience for our students. We are calling our morning block “STEAM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) and our afternoon block “ELA/Humanities" (Reading, Writing, Social Studies). Our students will still benefit from excellent instruction in reading, writing, math, social studies, and science; however, we are looking to the future as we incorporate technology and project-based learning within our integrated curriculum.

Here's what to expect this week in 5th grade:

STEAM- We are SO excited to begin using our Chromebooks! We are very fortunate to be able to provide a 1:1 experience in which every 5th grade student is paired with a laptop to use at school. We will begin “Chrome Camp” this week in which students will explore their new devices, ask questions from others, and teach others their new discoveries on how to best utilize the technology in our classroom setting. We will also begin learning how our STEAM workshop runs and begin our first math chapter on place value.

***Students will need a computer or device with Internet access for their nightly math homework. They will either log in to their Google account to access their homework through the Google classroom or they can use the Google classroom app. Students will show their work in their STEAM notebooks and be encouraged to bring home their math textbooks for extra help and extra practice if you feel it is necessary.

ELA- We will be discussing how our ELA workshop runs and begin our "Read to Self" training! We will explore what read to self looks like and will begin building our stamina so we can read for long periods of time. The absolute BEST way to become a better reader and enjoy reading is to dive in and READ! We will be discussing how to choose good fit books as well as the importance of REAL reading (THINKING while reading) vs. FAKE reading (reading the words without thinking of the text's meaning). We will also begin our first unit of study on analyzing themes with a focus on writing about our reading/thinking in our ELA notebooks.

This 1st week I encourage that you help your child build his/her reading stamina at home just like we will be building our stamina in school (we will start with 5 and work our way up to 20 minutes for homework). Students are responsible for reading the same book at home that they are reading at school. This will help students to focus on one book at a time and maintain our goal of reading more books this year than ever before! 

Homework- Homework will be texted using Remind 101 (if you have not signed up yet, please text @sch533 to 81010!) Students will also be aware of homework each night (if your student has a phone or device that receives texts, they are more than welcome to also sign up for Remind 101!) It is important to help your child find a good time and place to complete reading and homework each night. Thank you for all of your support at HOME! :)

Please CONNECT with our classroom→ 

Facebook: @MrsSchaefers5thGradeClass

Remind 101: text @sch533 to 81010 to sign up! 

Class Blog: schaefer5th.blogspot.com

Welcome to 5th Grade, Class of 2027!

Welcome to the 2019-2020 school year! I’m so glad you are in my class and I simply cannot wait to meet you! 

Isabel A., Noah A., Lily C., Kaden C., Will D., Elliott D., Lucas F., Michael F., Joy F., Caroline F., Luke G., Jillian H., Emily I., Gus J., Sydney J., Hudson K., Amelia L., 

Gwen O., Charlie P., Joshua R., Kathryn R., Aidan S., Kash S., Kyra S., Rose S.

Ice Cream Social/Meet the Teacher Night is Tuesday, August 13th from 5:30-7!

Last names N-Z from 5:30-6:15

Last names A-M from 6:15-7:00

Please CONNECT with our classroom→ 

Like Us on Facebook: @MrsSchaefers5thGradeClass (click on link)

Remind 101: text @sch533 to 81010 to sign up! 

Welcome to 5th Grade, Class of 2026!

Welcome--- It's going to be an AMAZING year!
We can't wait to meet you all!

Jackson B.

Kate B.
Gavin C.

Owen C.

Grant E.

Catherine F.

Katie H.

Nathan H.

Tea J.

Brady J.

Caroline K.

Luke M.

Nathan M.

Noelle M.

Kennedy M.

Anita M.

Charlie M.

Hana S.

Vedaant S.

Jonah W.

Parents--- Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!

Our Class Google Site 2018-2019