KEEPING UP WITH THE TIMES

I so much enjoyed meeting with you at parent conferences. I regard my role as your child’s teacher to be a partnership with you, his/her parents and myself. Together, we create the best possible educational and emotional experience for your child. Thank you for taking the time to conference with me and for your insights which help me be a better teacher. I am truly loving my class this year. It is such a luxury to have a small and bright class that allows me the time to work with each child and to provide each child with  the help and guidance he/she needs.  

As always, we have been very busy learning in school. In my math class, we are learning so much about fractions. There are many skills to learn with fractions, including problem solving and measurement. There will be a test on all that we have covered in fractions so far, next Monday and Tuesday (November 24 &25). I have given each student a practice test and other review sheets which we are working on in class all this week. Your child will need to practice and study from these review sheets in preparation for the test. In order to give the children enough time to review every skill, I am giving the test next week, even though it is right before the Thanksgiving break. If your child will be away next Monday and/or Tuesday, he/she will have to take the test upon returning. So, make sure he/she studies and the material is fresh in his/her mind upon returning.

We will be having our annual Thanksgiving feast next Tuesday, Nov. 25, at 11:15 – 12:15.  We celebrate Thanksgiving not only because it is an American holiday, but because we are studying American history in 5th grade. The story of the Puritans and their establishing a colony in America to be able to practice their religion free from persecution, is an important part of our understanding of the historical events  that has shaped our country and our values. In honor of all this, we will be cooking in class on Monday, Nov. 24. We will be making a hearty and delicious vegetable soup and corn bread. The other 5th grade will be making some dishes and we will come together and eat, talk about what we are thankful for and sing some songs about America. Each child has been assigned an ingredient to bring to school by Friday. An E-mail was sent out about this and I will post the list in class.

Our exploration of colonization is continuing with our student colonies filling their ships with cargo for the journey to the New World. Choices they make are crucial to their success. Will they bring enough food to see them through the long journey across the ocean? Will they have enough people to hunt, fish and farm for sustenance? Will they be able to negotiate with the Native American for land, food, water? What perils await our eager colonists on the ocean as well as the wilderness which is the New World? 5th graders are busily using their reasoning and problem solving skills to make the best possible choices in these life and death decisions.

In our study of writing, we are learning to recognize as well as write our own topic sentences and detail sentences to form paragraphs for narratives and essays. We work almost daily in these activities which will culmunate in writing a 3 -5 paragraph essay.  In literature, we are getting close to the end of our book. We are discussing the author’s use of: personification, symbolism and comic relief as literary techniques which make the book come alive.  In our study of inventions, each student has written a mini-report on an invention and its inventor. They typed it up in the computer lab, got pictures from Google Imagesand super imposed it onto their reports. The results look great and we all learned a lot about  some inventors and inventions. They are posted on the classroom wall.