Miscellaneous:
We have many things happening this week for the 5th graders. Our rotation for our safeties will begin this Monday September 24th. Mr. Gort has worked hard on setting up the safety schedule. Look for this schedule to come home this weekend with the students. The schedule will also be found on our blogs. Hopefully the students are working on collecting pledges for the walk-a-thon which will take place on Wed. Sept. 26th! We are raising money this year to support technology within our school. Our goal is for each student to raise at least $25 in pledges to help support this cause 🙂 The office has asked that you please date any notes that are sent to school. Lastly, Friday is blue and gold day at Georgetown! Friday is Hudsonville’s homecoming and the Hudsonville Fun Fest. The fun fest will take place in front of the football stadium from 4:30-7:00. Come join in the fun!
Math:
It has been great getting to know some new faces as students have been switching for math class this past week. We have begun unit one and have been discussing how to solve different kinds of story problems using an equation. Next week we will continue working on solving story problems, learning how to solve functions, using parenthesis in math problems, and will likely be given some homework and a quiz. Please make sure to check the blog of the math teacher that your child has for math to find out when homework and quizzes/tests will be coming up.
Writing:
We have steadily been pushing along through our memoir unit. This week we have tried to get as many entries into our writing journals as possible dealing with our “life topics”. Beginning next week, we are going to pick our 2 favorite entries, get with a partner, then decide together which one we want to choose as our seed idea. Our seed idea will be the memoir that we will concentrate on, nurture, and spend the rest of our memoir unit thinking about. Some writers prefer to zoom in on a seed idea, or focus early; others prefer simply to establish a general direction and focus more gradually. We will continue to listen to published authors and examine their memoirs as a way to take some of their ideas about action, dialogue, structure and details and incorporate those into our writing.
Reading:
Our reading this week will continue to focus on work that emphasizes the importance of text, but now will shift from narrative fiction stories to non-fiction texts. We will continue to practice writing in response to our short texts citing examples and/or details that support our thinking. Then we will share and score each others written responses so we can continue to improve our ability to “prove” our answers. Also, this week we will introduce using the same reading strategies used in reading narrative fiction and non-fiction short text to science diagrams and questions. Individualized daily reading (IDR) in our classrooms will be a daily priority. Keep checking those reading logs to reach the 150 minutes a week!