Plans Week of September 21, 2015

The Tuesday Timberwolves, doing their amazing group cheer, complete with wolf ears and noses.

Highlights from Last Week:
We have a temporary class pet thanks to Henry's mom --caterpillars that will change into monarch butterflies. To our delight, one of them has already wrapped itself in a cocoon. The others are munching on leaves voraciously to follow suit.

Most of the class finished publishing their "Hopes and Goals for 5th Grade" essay. Students learned how to work through the writing process thoughtfully, focusing on these five stages: planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. We'll use the writing process for the rest of the year in all of our writing endeavors.

In math we played some fun games to practice skills. "Factor Captor" helped students find factors of numbers and hinted at the importance of prime numbers. We also played a fast-paced game that I whipped together to practice our extended multiplication facts (factors having zeros).

Students learned about stamina and what you need to have good stamina to read and work for a long period of time, such as a quiet comfortable area and relief from external and internal distractions. On Friday, students were to read without interruption for 40 minutes while I discreetly monitored their stamina. Individual students now have goals to work on for next week to increase their stamina.

Comfy chairs were "closed until further notice" this week. Many students were abusing the privilege and allowing the premium seating to be a distraction to learning and productivity. Students will need to individually earn them back by working hard and focusing on their learning.

To help students get back on track, I reassigned seating. Social connections are now a little more spread out in the room. As part of our Group Skills training, students practiced compromising and working as a team to name their new table groups and create a group cheer/dance. Watching students collaborate in action was definitely a highlight of the week!

Students worked on their first Reading Response Blog and their first Homework Project this week. I hope they enjoyed the experience!
 
What we didn't get to:
Class games, formal reading assessments, storytelling and generating ideas in writing all will be moved to this upcoming week.


This Week's Plan

Special:
Monday: Open House for 3rd-5th Grade parents. 5th grade at 6:00pm, principal's address at 6:30pm.
Wednesday: No School. Yom Kippur

Reading:

• Reading Action Verbs --We'll learn how to increase the depth and insightfulness of our reading discussions using this list of thinking verbs.
• Listening to the Inner Reading Voice --We'll identify thoughts we have as readers and how important it is to keep a conversation going in our brains as we read.
• Teacher Read Aloud --I continue to read aloud from There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar. I will also preview some books for students by reading aloud the first chapter.
  
• Formal reading assessments --Now that I've had a chance to informally listen to every student read and discuss their book, I will now assess students formally, starting with a quick fluency assessment.

Writing:

• Generating Ideas --We'll learn some strategies for conquering the blank page. Students will learn how to think of people, places, passions, turning points, and more and list them in a special place that they can always return to when they need an idea for writing.
• Storytelling to Start --We'll practice a strategy called, "Storytelling," where students tell a partner about an experience to help get the order of events straight before writing.
• Spicy Vocabulary Words --I will show students some powerful pictures and ask them to think of vivid words that come to mind. Students will then practice using those words in a series of imaginative stories.

Math: 

• Extended Multiplication Facts --We continue practicing our extended multiplication facts, such as 60 x 70 = 4,200.
• Place Value --Students will explore the place value system as powers of 10 up to the billions place.
• Divisibility --We learn what it means to be divisible by a number and we learn some tricks to determining divisibility without actually dividing.
• Prime and Composite Numbers --We'll look at who's prime an who's composite up to the number 50.

Science:

• We launch into Science this week by setting up our Science Journals and learning how to make scientific drawings.

Social Studies:

• We begin our launch into Social Studies by looking at world maps and reading about the movement of people out of Africa, through Asia, over the Bering Strait, and down into North and South America.
  

Homework:
Please visit the Homework Page for full details. Students have a Reading Response Blog to respond to and are turning in their first Homework Project, All About Me. I won't assign a new homework project until next week.


Thanks for Reading!
So that's the plan for the week. Please feel free to email me with any questions, comments, or feedback. I look forward to meeting you at the Open House.

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