This Week in Room 33! Sept. 30- Oct. 4

The following is a BIG question we are exploring, discussing, and trying to answer in 5th grade. 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 unit on division as we show our complete understanding of the process through models, distributive property, partial quotients, and the standard long division algorithm. 

***It is SO IMPORTANT that students know their basic multiplication and division math facts! It is becoming increasingly difficult for those students who do not know their facts to complete the higher level thinking and problem solving that 5th graders are expected to do. Thank you for taking the extra steps to make sure your 5th grader is working towards mastery of these facts!  Math Magician is a great website to practice math facts. Students can also work on their QuickTables in ALEKS OR Xtramath through Clever.

ELA: I couldn’t be prouder of our literary essayists! Please read below for writing portfolio expectations to be completed by this Friday. 

***Students will be responsible for showing off their hard work and will celebrate with YOU! Students will show you their online writing portfolio Google site. They will show you their “Panyee Football Club” essay and their newest essay. They will also show you their self-evaluation checklist and share their “glows” and “grows” with you. Please help them celebrate their accomplishments, but also look for & encourage setting new goals for their next piece. These writers know that "when they are done, they've only just begun!" :) 

This week we will wrap up our book clubs and work hard to make our discussions stronger as we continue to make connections across texts and study our authors’ choices. We will also begin exploring narratives (our next writing unit). This week students will choose a small moment story idea with an emphasis on our study of refugees and immigrants. Some may choose to create their own story idea or continue the story of Home of the Brave or any of the other picture books we have read. They will work on creating a story arc to guide their writing. Students will utilize all they have learned from their study of reading and analyzing texts in our literary essay unit as they perfect their own narrative craft!  We will practice emphasizing the heart of our stories (what our stories are really about!) and elaborating on important details. We will discuss the importance of revealing the theme through the choices we make as authors in our narratives.

This Week in Room 33! Sept. 23-27

Check out the above video we will be watching in class called the "Power of Yet". As we focus on a growth mindset, it is important to remember that the only way we achieve our goals is through hard work and perseverance! We can do it! 

The following is a BIG question we are exploring, discussing, and trying to answer in 5th grade. Encourage your student to continue the discussion with YOU at home!

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

Reminder: Wed. is Picture Day & Be There Day! 

This week in 5th grade…

STEAM: We are completing our end of multiplication real world project→ our “Resort Report”! Check out your student’s work in the Google Classroom and their STEAM notebook! We will also begin our study of division this week! We will relate division to multiplication through fact families, divide with and without remainders, and notice division patterns with powers of 10. Keep practicing those math facts at home- it makes a WORLD of a difference when students know their facts quickly! Students can practice using Xtramath (through Clever), Math Magician, and/or Quicktables in ALEKS. 

We are also working within our “From Sun to Food” science unit. We will continue the discussion on photosynthesis, food chains, decomposition, and looking at an energy diagram. Ask to see your student’s science journal in the Google Classroom to see what they’ve been working on!

ELA: 

This week we will continue drafting our 2nd literary essay by working on/revising our introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions before we edit and publish by Friday! We will upload our essays to our Google site writing portfolios and celebrate with all of 5th grade! Students will be responsible for completing a self-evaluation checklist, and will share and celebrate with YOU next week. Book clubs are in full swing as we are debating to prompt rich conversation, reflecting on ourselves as book club contributors, and comparing themes across texts.

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