Plans Week of October 14, 2014

Review
Boy, did we luck out with the beautiful weather on our Wednesday field trip this week! We had another lovely week with some challenge, team building, and fun.

Highlights:

• Our field trip to the Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary was a blast. We saw turtles, snakes, and all sorts of water critters. We learned about a marsh ecosystem and how many animals live and interact within it.

• We read the short collection of stories about a community garden in inner city Cleveland called "Seedfolks". Students worked together to determine character traits and the point of view of a variety of people in the stories.
  
• In math, we learned how to round whole numbers and decimals to a given place value, which helps us estimate sums, differences, and products.
  
• Students analyzed two versions of a story ending I wrote about my first time skiing and learned how to end a story effectively.
  
• As a class, we had a great discussion about the benefits and challenges of being inclusive of a variety of academic, social, and emotional needs. We all vowed to work together to help everyone in our class learn equally. We also said goodbye to the amazing Mr. Sanders, who has been helping our classroom for the past 2 weeks. 
  

What We Didn't Get To:
I was all set to study pond water under a microscope, if only I collected the right pond water! We'll try it again this week.

• Compare and contrast two different points of view.
  
• Be an effective writing partner by asking for specific examples, asking for clarification, giving compliments, and giving constructive feedback.
  
• Add scenes from the past and the future to a story.

Special
On Friday morning, we have a special presentation about Trick or Treat for UNICEF, a 5th grade leadership opportunity to raise money for a good cause.


Reading
This week we'll start reading groups using books focused on the different points of view of the characters. Students will learn their groups on Monday.
In our groups, we'll be working on the following:

• Making "just right" inferences and quoting accurately from the text.
  
• Determining character traits of the main characters and comparing and contrasting them.
  
• Explaining how a narrator's point of view influences how events are described.
  

Writing
In Writing this week, students will make some finishing touches on their personal narratives. They will have the option to publish them to the class website. We'll then begin our last unit of study on personal narrative writing, working quickly through the writing process to produce one more story. We'll use what we've already learned and add some more sophisticated techniques from our study of mentor texts.

We'll learn about the following this week:

• How to be an effective writing partner by asking for specific examples, asking for clarification, giving compliments, and giving constructive feedback.

• Studying an excellent piece of writing and trying to emulate techniques we admire.
  
• Targeting sections of our writing to improve character development.

Math
This week in math, we'll work on the following:

• Multiplying whole numbers and decimals using the partial products method.
  
• Multiplying whole numbers and decimals using the US traditional algorithm.
  
• Using the order of operations and parenthesis and brackets.
  
• Comparing millions, billions, and trillions.
  

Science
We will work on the following in Science this week:

• Examine pond water under a microscope.
  
• Explain how ecosystems function and how animals interact with their environments. We'll read from short books about ecosystems.

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

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