Hi Everyone,
Welcome back to school! I hope that the routine is welcome. I know that I am glad to have a little set schedule happening. I have to say that it makes me really happy and a little teary to see your girls again. Sincerely. I enter this year with gratitude for your daughters and the relationship that I have with them, and the knowledge that this is the last year I get to spend with them. My goals are to cherish my time with them and to do my best to make sure that their eventual transition into middle school is as smooth as possible.
Some Important Notes:
Spelling Starts Next Week: We are beginning our first spelling test and current event next week. As always, spelling and Wordly Wise tests will alternate each week. This year, for Social Studies (and on the same week that we have spelling tests), each student will be required to read and report on a current event. There is a more detailed explanation of my expectations in your daughter’s Social Studies section.
Back to School Night (or rather, Afternoon): Again, in hoping to limit the amount of times you have to return to the school, we will be holding Back To School Night at 3:30 next Tuesday the 2nd. It shouldn’t take too long, and your daughters (and siblings)are welcome to listen in or work on homework while we chat. Basically, and mainly, I want to go over the new fifth grade expectations (grading system, LA and Math midterms, etc.). If you have other responsibilities right after school, please feel free to shoot me an email, and we can schedule a time to chat in person or over the phone. On Tuesday, instead of bringing the girls down for pick up, I’ll just keep them in the classroom. You can come straight up to the room, and we will start at 3:30.
Dallas Field Trip: While King Tut’s Tomb will certainly be very cool, I also found out that the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth is having an extraordinary Impressionist Exhibit that you can read more about at https://www.kimbellart.org/index.aspx. I went ahead and got tickets, as it would haunt me to not do it. It will get us home at quite a late hour that day, but it is well worth it (our Kimbell tickets are for a 2:00 entrance). I love teaching kids about art history, and the Impressionists are some of my favorite units to teach. It will be challenging to find time to work it in within the next 6 weeks, but we should take advantage of the opportunity. Mark Stelmach has offered to join us on the trip, and we have room (both in the van and ticket-wise) for 2 more adults to join us.
Gluten Free: This year, one of our students is going gluten free. Should you want to share a goodie with the class, please let me know ahead of time so that we can make sure she has a fair alternative.
Pizza: We will start ordering pizza next week. This year, we are getting it from Brick Oven down the road. The fee is $64 through the Winter Break.
New School Phone Number: We have a new general number for the school—497-7125. Thanks to all of you, I now have a fancy new IPhone that I find pretty fun and handy. We will still keep the parent line open during the day for emergencies.
What we are up to in class:
Math: Fifth grade group is using Investigations to review factors and multiples. We learned how to create factor trees to help find factors of a number. They also are learning how to use the factors of a two digit number to find the factor of a three digit number (example: using the factors of 18 to find the factors of 180). We are also reviewing the two different ways to multiply a two digit number. Some of our math facts are a little rusty after a few months off, but I expect that everyone will be back in the flow within a few weeks. Sixth grade math is getting used to using a hard back text. The girls have been doing an excellent job of setting up their papers neatly. This group is using their Connected Mathematics to review number concepts and patterns such as factors, multiples, prime and composite numbers, odd and even numbers, prime factorization as well as least and greatest factors and multiples.
Language Arts: We have started reading The Phantom Tollbooth. This book is rich in word play and is a fun way to start of f the year. The girls are expected to read a chapter a few times each week and fill in the graphic organizer that they set up under “Tollbooth” on their computers. We have a more formal grammar program this year called Winston Grammar. This week is a basic and quicky review of nouns and articles. Our writing focus this trimester is writing to a prompt. When given your typical “What kind of an animal would you be and why?”, how do you formulate a logical, descriptive and interesting answer. It is good to start the year off with this, as we do not work too long on each prompt, it gets us back into the habit of writing. It is also an area that is highly focused on in most late elementary classes.
Science: This trimester, we are studying Life Science. This week, we are focusing on the classification of living things. We used a dichotomous key to classify the beans found in a 15 bean soup. We also discussed how scientists create the scientific name of an organism. We used graphic organizers to categorize the characteristics of the vertebrate Subphylum (reptiles, birds, amphibians, etc.) and the plant Kingdom.
Social Studies: We are focusing this week on the development of communities in the United States. We discussed the Bering Strait and its role in the development of civilization in North America. Utilization of natural resources again plays a key role in the development of different societies. After learning about the Anasazi, we will create our own clay cliff dwellings.
Best,
Teresa