Happy Friday!!

I hope everyone had a wonderful winter break and had a smooth transition back into school with the kiddos.  I was thrilled to see their smiling faces on Monday morning after not seeing them for two weeks!

Science: We have started a new chapter this week, the solar system!  The kids are super excited and interested in this topic.  This week we started off our unit by reading books, watching video clips, making vocabulary cards, and engaging in conversations with our peers all based around how the Earth revolves and rotates.  Next week we will be learning about stars.

Writing:  At the beginning of this week students participated in an On-Demand writing session as the final piece of our informational unit.  We are now underway in our unit based around memoirs.  We have enjoyed reading memoirs and using mentor texts to help guide us as we create our own memoirs.

Math:  It is that time of the year where we have begun working on fractions.  While many students expressed concerns about fractions, they are doing a great job of pushing themselves and sticking with the problems even when they become tricky.  I introduced them to the “ladder method” today which is a shortcut they can use for several of the concepts we have discussed this week: simplifying fractions, greatest common factors, and least common multiple.  Ask them to show you!  It is pretty fancy. :)

Reading: We have been working on finding themes in a variety of books during reading.  We also discussed the difference between a main idea and theme.  Reading has been a great supporting resource for writing this week!  

Social Studies:  We have been learning about European explorers this week .  Students have been practicing how to read a text and then take notes on the information.  Main idea and supporting details have playing a huge role in our social studies work.

This week we also started the D.A.R.E. program.  All 5th grade classes will have a police officer come to their classroom for a 45 minute lesson, centered around drug abuse prevention, each week.  Our D.A.R.E. days are on Tuesday afternoons.  The kids are very excited!  

I hope you enjoy a relaxing weekend.  Stay warm!

Sincerely,

Miss DiFranco