Plans Week of October 20, 2014

Review
This week students got used to working in rotations, focusing on independence and personal drive.

Highlights:

• We heard from a representative from UNICEF about Trick or Treat for UNICEF. Fifth graders lead the school-wide fundraising effort, and it doesn't have to be involved in Halloween excursions.

• Books groups launched this week. Students read and discuss their inferences in small groups.
  
• We finished Unit 2 in Math on estimation and computation and look forward to an assessment this upcoming week.
  
• Our microscopes activity was a blast. Students loved zooming in on the pond critters, especially the leeches and nymphs.
  
• In Writing, students read through the comments I left them on their personal narratives. They made revisions and edits. I let them take their time on this rather than rush into the next writing assignment. We'll do that this week.

What We Didn't Get To:
In Writing:

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

In Math:

•  Comparing millions, billions, and trillions.
  

Special
Our first All School Meeting will be held on Monday, October 20 in the gymnasium at 8:37am. 


Reading
We'll continue reading and discussing our books. As we read, we'll continue to focus 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
We will hopefully wrap up our unit on personal narrative writing this week. We'll work on the following techniques:

• Studying an excellent piece of writing and trying to emulate techniques we admire.
• Targeting sections of our writing to improve character development.
• Giving our stories structure by stretching out the tension and telling it bit by bit.
• Zoom in to the exact sequence of actions and images of an experience and write in a way that allows readers to have the same reactions you had.

Math
Here is the math plan this week:

• Review concepts from Unit 2, such as adding and subtracting decimals, estimating products, multiplying decimals using the traditional algorithm and the partial products algorithm, and multiplying and dividing by powers of 10.
  
• Take the Unit 2 math assessment.
  
• Begin Unit 3 on geometry explorations. We will look at measuring angles and properties of triangles, quadrilaterals, and other polygons.
  

Science

• We will finish our reading on ecosystems.
  
• We will read about food chains.
  
• Students will synthesize their knowledge of ecosystems and food chains in a homework project.
  

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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