Please note students received a good load of paperwork for parents tonight. Please take a look at the sheets and fill them out if you would. Also included was information about our first APTT session, which is next Thursday the 1st of September. I would love to see all parents there, especially those whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting face to face.
How is it already Wednesday?!
This morning was a whirlwind of area models, multiplication, and a bit of talk about decimals. Thankfully many students remembered that when we talk about numbers to the right of the decimal point, we are really just talking about fractions.
Tonight students should continue their work with area models. The bottom two problems here are a *bit* tricky. Think about how you solve problems using the distributive property of multiplication over addition. If you know some values, I’m pretty sure you can figure out the unknowns!
In language Arts we talked about character traits for just a little bit, and then got into some discussion about reader’s response. Essentially our reader’s response writing should be our current thinking about whatever we are reading. What are you wondering? Are you curious about what happens next? Are you perplexed by the actions of a character? Did something happen in the book that upset you? That worried you?
Students will be recording these thoughts in their reader’s response journals. We also copied down some good starters for our reader’s response:
Tonight students should pick one of the prompts, and write a response to what they are reading. They may either respond to The Mysterious Benedict Society, which we are reading together, or they may respond to the book they are currently reading on their own.
Students then read their Tina/Timmy stories to each other. They did a WONDERFUL job with these, and had a good time sharing them. Most students were able to guess what character trait their partner was aiming for, which shows they did a good job writing a character that displays that trait.
In science we got a lot more done with our seeds. Each group finished up planting their seeds, and then we made some observations about the seeds and our actions so far. We recorded these in our science journals. Some of our seeds even looked to be germinating already. I was quite surprised by that, and the students were delighted.
Finally at the end of the day we went into the computer lab where students logged into IXL. IXL is a program that has been purchased by our school to assist children with math, language arts, and science. Students log in, and they can work through sets of problems and topics that are relevant to 5th grade. They can also go back to other grades and even ahead for enrichment. It will be slowly worked into our daily rotations. Students are welcome to use IXL at home if they would like. Our login page can be found under the ‘General Links’ tab above.
so, tl;dr
Work with some area models
Write a response to what you are currently reading, or to The Mysterious Benedict Society. Use one of the prompts we wrote down in our Reader’s Response Journal.
and please read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter