This week, students discussed what characteristics make a good team member and how they can be a contributing team member when working in a group at STARBASE. They also briefly learned about what a call sign is, as STARBASE asks students to come up with one to be called throughout our 5 days there. We showed a video of Top Gun (without sound, don’t worry) to show students the call signs on their helmets. We then took some time to come up with our own call signs - ask your child what he or she came up with!
Math
Before taking our unit 6 assessment, we reviewed the material in an activity called Footloose. This activity consisted of Mrs. B and Ms. Y creating many math problems synthesizing the work we did in unit 6. We mounted these notecards on colored paper that corresponds to the types of questions asked on the assessment. These notecards were posted all around the room and students moved from card to card solving each problem and recording the answers on their answer sheet. After completing a handful of problems, students would check their work with one of the adults in the room. This activity not only got students out of their seats and moving around, but it also helped students review the concepts of unit 6 and allowed for Mrs. B and Ms. Y to get an idea of students’ readiness for the assessment. Instead of taking the unit test last Friday, we decided students would benefit from engaging in this activity one more day on Tuesday and then we will take the unit 6 assessment on Wednesday! Check out how engaged students were in Footloose!
Science
Students reviewed their data from their initial levers experiment. Next week, students will be exploring the three different classes of levers and where we see these levers in our everyday lives!
Reading
We have enjoyed our guest teacher, Mrs. Van Batavia, who came to our classroom three times last week to work on narrative writing. Our students have been writing up a storm! Mrs. Van Batavia has introduced many strategies for coming up with story ideas, which she calls seed stories. Each time we work on narrative writing, students are given about 15 minutes to begin a narrative story. As the unit progresses, students will choose one of their seed stories and expand on it to make it a final draft.
Another guest teacher, Mrs. Kastner, came in to teach our students about a website called Kidblog. We will be using Kidblog in the future and hopefully will be able to collaborate with other 5th graders outside of Alice Smith using this platform!
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Students creating their first blog post telling their readers what they are excited about in Kidblog. |
Our next novel studies are under way! Students chose between the novels Esperanza Rising, Hatchet, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and My Side of the Mountain. This time around, as they complete their reading and annotating, students are also coming up with a few “deep-thinking” questions to discuss rather than Mrs. B and Ms. Y coming up with all the questions.
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| Our first two novel groups coming up with discussion questions before meeting as a group. |
Social Studies
We had visitors from Clara Barton earlier this week to observe Mrs. B’s use of technology. They observed a lesson in Social Studies; Mrs. B was using an interactive presentation called Pear Deck, which allows students to follow along on their Chromebooks and answer questions as she presents. We will continue learning about Geography topics next week.
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