Calendar, Connections, and Curriculum for the Week of November 27

Calendar

December 6-7  Parent - Teacher Conferences

December 8  9:30 AM, Ballroom Dance Culminating Event for 5th Grade Students, Gymnasium

December 9  2:00 PM  TODD BEAMER HIGH SCHOOL Colors of the Rainbow Ballroom Dance Competition Team

December 12  Book Reports Due

December 15   Class Winter Multicultural Celebration

Connections:

Our read aloud novel is Ugly, an autobiography by Robert Hoge

In Language Arts one of our shared stories was The Summer My Father Was Ten.  Most students seem to connect well to this story of a group of boys who were out having fun, which resulted in the vandalism of an elderly immigrant neighbor's garden cultivated in a vacant lot.  The protagonist feels shame and guilt and eventually takes steps to fix the problem.  As a result a relationship develops between they boy and the neighbor, and a tradition of gardening and sharing was born by the intersection of those paths.

Students have their cereal box biography book report due December 12.

If you look down in the math section, you'll see that students are learning and practicing different methods of long division.  My favorite is the partial quotient method, something out of the Everyday Math Days.  This was our Friday math fun and quite a lot of students took to it.


Curriculum Highlights: 


Language Arts:

Students continued in their Graphic Novel module and on the same literature circle teams.  They changed books for the third time within the unit. Our main reading and writing focus has turned to summarizing texts with a main idea sentence and supporting details from the text. We are also working to clarify the difference between a summary based upon a main idea sentence and communicating the central message of the story, which students were substantially successful at in the week before Thanksgiving.

Language Arts Homework: 

Reading about 25 minutes a day or more. A few students were assigned to read their graphic novels at home this weekend in order to stay current with their groups. 

Students are working on Spelling Unit no. 4 and/or Root Vocabularies 1 - 4. Their spelling / vocabulary tests are on Tuesday and their packets are due that day. 

Cereal Box Book Reports on Biographies are due on December 12


Mathematics:  This week we are working on division of larger multi-digit numbers

Examples are 492 /  16   and     3468/ 17   and application word problems.  Within Eureka we worked on Lessons 19-22 and all students had time to work on Zearn on computers from our mobile lab.  Three students have now completed all the Zearn Online components for Missions 1 and 2, and have been accelerated into Unit 6, the last learning module of 5th grade, which is a geometry related unit. That achievement is related to these students' work at home on the program.

Students have taught different approaches to division including looking for patterns of dividing by multiples of 10, estimating a division answer (quotient) by rounding the divisor and using basic math facts to see the relationship between the divisor and dividend (quantity being divided).  They continue to work with long division and having remainders, and are being asked to check their work by multiplication.  They have also learned how to use multiplication to find intermediate division steps and on Friday were taught the partial quotients method of dividing. They are also being asked to think about the relationships between quantities and not simply learning a method of calculation.  Finally there has been work about how to use the quotient to provide reasonable answers for division related application questions.

Math Homeworks:  Lessons 19-21, Zearn 25 mins.