Room 27 Update

Wow, despite not have a full five-day week of school yet, we sure have been busy learning here in room 27.

Math: This week in math we finished Topic 1 on place value. Today, with much patience, students successfully took their first math assessment online, despite some technology problems with the website this morning. Your child's score can be viewed when they log into pearsonrealize.com (password is in homework folder). Your child's work and official score will be sent home on Monday. I am very proud of the students for showing all of their working and strategies as they completed the test. Monday we will being Topic 2: adding and subtracting decimals.

Social Studies: This week students started reading non-fiction text about the Maya civilizations, hoping to answer their curiosities recorded in our online "social studies classroom". Students are practicing organized note-taking and identifying the important ideas in non-fiction text. We will continue to read about the Maya from other sources of information including as books, magazine, and videos.

Writing: Len Cabral, an amazing storyteller, visited our school this week. He came just in time to kick off our narrative writing unit. Len introduced students to the idea of "scar stories" or stories that have left an impact on who we are. After, we returned to class and began to brainstorm our own ideas for personal narrative writing. Next week we will choose a topic and begin drafting.

Reading: This week we continued to explore narrative story elements. We focused in plotting story events and identifying the turning point or "peak" of the story mountain. Students will use this knowledge in their reading as well as when they begin to write their own narrative stories. For the past few days we narrowed our focus in on setting. Not just being able to identify the setting but analyzing how the setting impacts the characters. We read the first two chapters of The Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe  by CS Lewis and practiced describing the setting of the Professor's house and Tumnus' cave. We also practiced using textual evidence or looking for text in the book that supports our conclusions about how the characters are impacted by the setting. Today students got to read a special narrative non-fiction story written by the I Survived  author Lauren Tarshis, describing the Joplen tornados. We discussed the unique point of the that Tarshis used to tell this story along with another element of narrative stories: mood. Next week we will be continue to dig deeply with other story elements such as characters, conflict, and theme.


Enjoy your Weekend! :)

Our First "Week"

We had a GREAT start to the school year this week. To build our classroom community and get to know one another we participated in many fun activities including "A What?", mystery bags, "Would you rather?", and fact or fiction. We have set routines, organized our materials, and began to develop our thoughts about the kind of place we want our classroom to be. Today in math students worked in collaborative groups to solve the Rectangle Challenge. I am looking forward to another great week! 

Happy long weekend!  

Mrs. Williams 

Welcome to 5th Grade!

Special Schedule

Monday- Health
Tuesday- Library
Wednesday- Music
Thursday- Art
Friday- P.E.