WE DID IT (almost!)

What a wonderful week of great work and celebration!  Students worked extremely hard at their travel brochures, getting ready for the Travel Show on Monday.  We finished the week feeling accomplished - after a few tweaks tomorrow morning in Media, we will print and be ready for the Travel Show at 11:00!  Come see our islands before or after lunch. Students are welcome to bring island

We also celebrated Arts n Blues week with our special musician guest, TJ Wheeler.  I enjoyed watching the Grant School Blues Corps perform at the Roots n Blues Music Festival.  Great job, kids!  Grant School is a community full of creative talents.

Speaking of Grant School talent, I was very impressed with our MAP Scores and you may have read about Grant's success in the newspaper.  Specifically, the students in our class were very successful and that is encouraging as we plan for the year.  In 5th grade, we do our best to support creative, high quality projects from our learners and you will see that with the island project tomorrow.  The students are also creating impressive math posters applying their skills to multi-step word problems.  Below is the focus for the upcoming weeks in each subject.

SOCIAL STUDIES:  After finishing our geography unit with the Travel Show, we will spend a bit of time reflecting on our work and then getting ready to start our next thematic unit, Powwow, focusing on Native American culture.  A packet describing our work in this theme will be sent home in an upcoming Friday Folder.

READING: I have completed beginning of the year reading assessments with the whole class.  The time spent listening to readers and having them talk and write about their reading has given me a chance to know more about each reader.  We have practiced asking and answering questions and making personal connections.  Students will complete a personal connection table this week and we will also take the monthly STAR computerized math assessment.  I will be sending home results of this test with information about book choices for book shares in an upcoming Friday Folder.  When the Powwow theme begins, all students will be in book clubs, reading award winning novels with Native American backgrounds.

WRITING:  The Travel Brochure and other island writing took up most of our writing time of late.  In making the brochure, students got first hand experience using nonfiction writing features on the computer.  During the Powwow theme, students will focus on using nonfiction features to make a museum exhibit about Native American culture.  IN between the Travel Show and beginning Powwow, we will take time to finish our I AM poems, which are turning out great! 

MATH: Students are deep into practicing multiplication.  We are practicing 2 by 2 digit and this week 3 by 2 digit multiplication.  We practice using estimates to check our work and our class discussions are covering many mental math strategies and multiplication properties.  Everyone created a math poster last week using ratios and multiplication to answer word problems.  I'll post some here this week.  These posters we will continue to make to improve our math communication and problem solving of multi step problems.

SCIENCE:  After the Travel Show, we will spend more focus on science this week.  There will finally be our observation of Stewart Park.  We are planning one more field trip this fall to Capen Park for our last community field experience.  I will let you know the date as soon as possible.  Students will start gathering their observations and making word posters reflecting their most inspirational observations.  We will use these posters to decide on our year long community science project.