STARBASE MN

I'll LET THE PICTURES TELL THE STORY! 

Week 17

Math
We have been quickly moving through Unit 7 and will be testing on Tuesday just in time for STARBASE. The students have been learning about Order of Operations and creating their own acronym for Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Check out this padlet to see what silly sayings they came up with. We now have a class blog and our homeroom students are working on creating their own order of operations problem to post and have others try and solve. All the posts aren't public yet but check back in a few days and see if you can solve their problems! We are ending this unit with adding and subtracting negative and positive numbers. Not an easy concept to grasp but we used some yellow and red chips to make this abstract concept concrete and boy did it help!

Here the students are testing their order of operations knowledge with the "We Got This" activity. This group is showing you how they celebrate when they all get the same correct answer.

 Other groups hard at work on PEMDAS

Science
We are moving on to the next simple machine, the pulley. The students spent one class time working with their new science partners to create a pulley system. They were able to create a single fixed and single movable pulley system. The next step was to measure the force, in Newtons, to see how much effort it would take to lift a load.

Social Studies
Climate, geography, land forms, water forms...we have been learning lots. The students have been following along with our presentations and answering questions using PearDeck, completing anticipation guides, reading the text and taking 3-column notes online and on paper to solidify their understanding of how geography does affect where we live.


Reading
Our survival novels are just about finished and the students have been enjoying their books, discussing with their classmates, completing online forms to show their understanding and blogging about the significant moments in their novels. Take a peek at our class blog and leave your child and their classmates some (QUALITY) comments:). We have a few classes following our blog and are looking forward to receiving feedback from students we haven't met yet.

Esperanza Rising book discussion

         Learning how to blog and write a quality post that others will want to read and respond to.

We have been learning about internal and external conflict and determining what conflicts appear in the novels we are reading and in some popular picture books. The students also created a blog post about conflict, check out the blog to read their posts and leave them a comment.

Writing

Mrs. Van Batavia continues to visit our class 2-3 times a week to guide the students through the narrative writing process.  The class is working on crafting a good lead that will hook their readers. The students analyzed other leads from published authors and discussed what they liked in a lead and what type of lead hooked them. Stay tuned for more information about their published narratives, it will be coming in the next few weeks. We are all looking forward to reading their stories!

Week 16

STARBASE

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!

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.

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.

Week 2 back from break!

STARBASE

Many students have brought back permission slips for STARBASE, which is great!  Students should continue to bring in their permission slips if they have not already.  All forms need to be returned by January 22nd.  If you were not able to check out the video linked in last week’s blog post, here it is!

2016 Goals

We finalized our 2016 goals presentation and will be printing the slides out this week!  As we move through the rest of the year, we will revisit these goals, check-in, and see the progress we’ve made.

Math

Fractions have become our best friends!  Last week we began adding and subtracting fractions and learning to use common denominators.  To do so, we worked with fraction circles to visualize each addition or subtraction problem.  In our math 2 time, students played “Fraction Capture” with a partner. We will continue refining our addition and subtraction skills for fractions this week before taking our Unit 6 assessment on Friday.

Reading

Our students made adorable snowmen crafts with their grandfriends on Monday at Chapel View!

This week, we read a short story called “Podhu and Aruwa.”  It is an African Folktale about two brothers.  Students had the chance to think about their own relationships with their siblings or think about siblings they know to write about why siblings argue and solutions to those arguments.  We also discussed great readers make inferences while they read; students were asked to do so while reading the story.  I (Ms. Yesnes) read half of the story aloud and the students paired up to read the second half aloud with a partner or two.

Once students read the story entirely, they collaborated with one of their classmates in an interactive presentation created on Pear Deck.  They loved using the Chromebooks and participating in an interactive lesson, which is apparent by many of the smiling faces in the following pictures!

This coming up week, a guest teacher, Teresa Van Batavia, will be coming in to teach narrative writing and will be joining us until the unit is complete.  She is the literacy coordinator for K-6 grades; we are lucky to have her in the classroom!

Finally, students picked their new novels and began planning for our next novel study!

Science

Students finished their exploration of the Moai statues on Easter Island early in the week.  We then revisited our unit on Levers.  We were testing the amount of effort it took to lift a load along a lever arm.  Half of the class tested the effort needed when moving the load, while the other half tested the effort needed when moving the effort itself. (Ask your child about the lever vocabulary - he/she should know it like the back of his/her hand!)

Social Studies

Students became familiar with maps this week as they made diagrams of the classroom, as well as studied features of a global map.

Students also had the chance to watch a video about Martin Luther King Jr. and explore the History.com website about MLK.  They took notes about interesting, surprising, and important aspects about MLK’s life.

Back from Winter Break

STARBASE
A letter was sent home last week informing families about our upcoming 5 day (all day) field trip to StarBase. If you want to get a sneak peak and see what sort of things we will be doing, click here and watch the 5th grade video. The letter sent home states that all permission slips, bag lunch information and money are due on Monday, January 25th, which the students informed me is a day off. Please have all forms completed and returned to school by Friday, January 22nd. If you have any questions please contact your child's homeroom teacher.

2016 Goals
Take a look at this presentation to see what your child's 2016 goal is (Mrs. B's homeroom only)!


Math

We started out our week back by taking a Moving With Math Assessment on the computer. The students took this test early in the fall and we wanted to check in to so see how their math skills have grown so far this year. Our current unit is Unit 6 - Data and Fractions. 

 

During our math 2 time we were able to check out this fun website called Estimation 180. The students had to use their estimation skills to figure out the number of miles, cheese balls, diet coke and people's height to name a few.

Reading

The students enjoyed picking their own partners for partner reading a short story this week.

The students have been enjoying their read to self books of their choosing. Next week we will be starting our survival unit which will include Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, Island of the Blue Dolphins and Esperanza Rising which were chosen by the class. This week we read the short story Kaddo's Wall and contemplated whether or not the wealthy should be responsible for sharing their wealth. Below the students were participating in a socratic seminar where they were able to discuss the story, answer questions and use the text to support their thinking. 

Science
The students learned this week how the famous Moai statues on Easter Island may have been moved using levers during the time period 1100-1640. Check out this website if you are intrigued as well.