Aloha parents and blog followers!
It's amazing how much fifth graders can accomplish in one week! We kicked things off on Tuesday (thanks to a Monday at home for Yom Kippur) with an integrated morning meeting. Fifth grade teachers combined all three classrooms, gave them a little shake, and divided into three groups. Ms. Pizzo, Mr. Church, and I held a morning meeting in our classrooms that comprised some students from each class. We each discussed healthy eating and the effects healthy foods have on our bodies and on learning. Students brainstormed a list of healthy choices they can bring to school for snack and lunch. Some ideas included: bananas, apples, cheese, nuts and seeds, whole grains, peanut butter, vegetables, water, and onward the list goes. Avoiding sugar can really help with attention to tasks in the classroom.
In class, we've begun cursive. Students are very excited about this! We're using the Handwriting Without Tears program developed by Jan Z. Olsen, which groups letters according to formation and begins with letters that students know from printing. You'll see handwriting practice come home as part of homework. If you oversee your child's homework, you can reinforce the correct formation of the cursive letters. Instructions and visual examples fill the pages of the practice book.
In mathematics, we utilized number lines to explore numbers up to the thousands and ten thousands and shared strategies of using mental math for addition and subtraction. It's interesting to see how we solve problems differently, but have the same answers as our outcomes. On Friday, we did an activity exploring products and factors and we are working to build our math vocabulary.
Next week I begin conferences with students about learning profiles. I will sit down with students individually and talk to them about their strengths and growing edges. I will explain that we want to capitalize on their strengths in the classroom and coach them in how to ask teachers to use teaching strategies that utilize those strengths. As we look in detail at their growing edges, students will set goals to work on. Your child will have a list of goals in the front of their Trapper Keeper, which they will work on over the next month. We'll revisit these goals at the end of the month to assess how they're doing with them.
In social studies we had our first "quiz", or as we called it, review assessment. Students are very anxious about having to perform on quizzes and tests, so we are avoiding these terms for the time being until we gain confidence in our abilities to prepare for them and demonstrate our knowledge on them. We used the author's note from the story, The Lotus Seed, a book we read in class set in Vietnam, to learn about Vietnamese emperors and the basics of French rule in Vietnam. I created modified notes, which are a way to differentiate instruction in the classroom and provide note-taking support to students who might otherwise become overwhelmed with the process. I created notes from the reading and left blanks for students to fill in. We read the text together as a class in a choral reading format. Together students read aloud with me, trying to match their voices to mine as I modeled appropriate fluency and expression. Then, we decided where the key ideas were in the text, and highlighted them. Following that, we pulled out details and highlighted them. They filled in the blanks in their notes and had their first set of social studies information with which to work.
In small groups I discussed what I wanted them to learn for their review assessment. We discussed different strategies for learning the information and created individual memory plans - a plan detailing how we would review the information and set it in our memory. It was neat to see students tap into how they learn best and plan out how they would use that strength for their review assessment!
We've been working on creating vivid description in writing AND we've explored writing odes in our writer's notebooks. Stay tuned for students posting their odes to the blog. I hope to finish the writing process with them next week and have them up for you to see!
Have a great weekend!
Laura
No comments:
Post a Comment