October 1, 2010

Dear parents,

We are off and running in fifth grade. We have begun Framing Your Thoughts, a multi-sensory curriculum, that teaches writing skills.  We reviewed what a subject of a sentence is and associated symbols (visual), a verbal chant (auditory) and hand signs (kinesthetic) to help us understand, and to aid our recall.  We've extended that to proper nouns (called proper names in FYT), and capitalized these subjects.  In the students' writing, I am now holding them responsible for capitalization of proper nouns and we are weaving this into our editing process.

We are finishing a unit in mathematics, which focuses on place value and review.  As we conclude the unit next week, I will send home a review guide for students to complete before I give an assessment.  You will see more about this in their agenda next week.  They will have ample study/review time at home before the assessment.  Expect to see Fact Triangles come home for students to practice as well.  As much as possible, I am gently moving students away from counting on their fingers, to thinking about math facts.  We are learning strategies to help make sense of math facts so students have greater success remembering them.

Students completed a PowerPoint presentation today (on schedule!) and this was their first experience with following a multi-part assignment.  They self-evaluated their work using a rubric and will present their presentations to the class next week.  This was a mini-project to support our learning and review of maps.  We will be starting our unit on Early Colonization as soon as our project presentations are complete.

You may have noticed that I don't send home a lot of corrected papers.  All papers are stored in your child's Trapper Keeper under the designated subject heading.  Please peruse these papers to keep up to date with work going on in class.  At the end of a unit, I will send home a group of papers for you to keep, freeing up the Trapper for our next unit.  Students are also keeping a copy of their digital work on their flash drives.

Thank you for keeping on top of the agendas at home. It's great communication tool for us to stay in touch.  I will be calling home next week to check in with you to see how your child has adjusted to fifth grade and to see if you have any information, comments, or concerns you want to share with me.

You will be hearing from Grade Parents shortly. We had our planning meeting today and they will soon be contacting parents via email to organize 5th grade events and field trips.

I hope to see you all at Founder's Day and/or at the Gala!  It should be a wonderful time.

Warmly,
Laura