Week 11 - Reality has set in...winter has shown up

Music Concert
Wow, our 5th graders sounded fabulous at their practice performance during school on Thursday. They can sing, dance and play the xylophone...they can do it all!

Reading

We enjoyed our second trip to visit our Grandfriends at Chapel View on Monday. The students used cray pas to color in a fall leaf and then using a craft stick they added some creative lines and swirls to make it pop.

The students finished their novels A Long Walk to Water or Home of the Brave and will be reading the other of the two novels after Thanksgiving break. I was extremely impressed with their daily annotations and the depth of their group discussions. Many students enjoyed their novels and had their eyes opened to the hardships and struggles that other children their own age have had to deal with. Check out Katherine Applegate's response to our tweet...we were jazzed that the author knew we were reading and discussing her book.

Science
What an exciting week we had in science! The students recorded their first observations for our Salinity Investigation. They are trying to figure out what the salinity (amount of salt in water) range of tolerance is for their seeds. Now that was fun but not nearly as much fun as watching brine shrimp hatch and swim around in the water. I have to admit I was a little skeptical, I have not taught this specific lesson before and I wasn't quite sure if the shrimps would hatch and that we would be able to witness it. Boy was I completely wrong! Not only could the students see the shrimps jerkily move around they witnessed the shrimps hatching.

Math

The students have been working extremely hard learning long division and figuring out what to do with the remainder in story problems. We will be taking our Unit 4 - Division test tomorrow and moving on to Unit 5 after Thanksgiving break. 




We also took some time to play fun games that will help us learn and become quicker with our multiplication facts. The students played a version of head bands, Shake Rattle & Roll and Safety Zone.