Plans Week of November 24, 2014

Highlights from Last Week

• Our Class Breakfast Bash was a blast! Thank you parents for joining us to celebrate our hard work in writing. Students did a fantastic job preparing for our presentation, and cleaning up after it!
  
• Our teaching intern, Ms. Faucon, has been absolutely amazing! She's running guided reading groups, helping students as they work independently, and joining in all of our class activities like she was born to do this!
  
• We met with our first grade reading buddies on Thursday. The first graders picked out a book for the fifth graders to read with them. 
• We had a fun trivia game on the European Explorers. Students worked in teams to answer their own questions about their research.
  
• In math, we dove deeper into decimal multiplication and division instead of launching into fractions. Students learned how to multiply and divide by decimals less than 1. This will help us immensely when we start learning about operations with fractions.
  

What We Didn't Get To

• Describe how a narrator’s or speaker’s point of view influences how events are described.
• Review fraction concepts and relate them to decimals.
• Students will write two diary entries that describe one interaction, one from the perspective of a European explorer and one from the perspective of a Native American. (Most students barely finished one diary entry. They had too much fun researching.)

Special
Wednesday, November 26th:

• Thanksgiving Assembly at 9:30am
  
• Early release at noon

Thanksgiving Break this week!

Reading
Here is what we will work on in Reading this short week:

• Continue reading and discussing in our book groups.
• Students complete "Reading Reports", which have them summarize, infer, predict, evaluate, describe, questions, and look up vocabulary.
• Describe how a narrator’s or speaker’s point of view influences how events are described.

Writing
Instead of starting a new writing project, we will use Writing Time for Social Studies.

Math
Here is what we will work on in Math this week:

• Review decimal multiplication and division concepts.
  
• Take a quiz on the above.
  

Science
Here is what we will work on in Science this week:

• Dissecting owl pellets! We'll learn about the eating habits of owls and the food chain.
  

Social Studies
Here is what we will work on in Social Studies this week:

• We begin learning about Colonial America.
  
• We'll read, "You Wouldn't Want to be an American Colonist"
  

Thanks for Reading!
So that's the plan for the week. Please feel free to email me with any questions, comments, or concerns.