We are into our 11th week of school and my fifth graders come to school every day with a colossal appetite for learning.
Thank you for supporting your child every day by letting him/her read aloud to you. Your child brings a monthly reading log home. Please make sure he/she reads to you for 20 minutes every day. At the end of each month, sign the log and send it back to school. Also, many thanks for taking the time to complete those take-home read alouds. As students move up through the grades, we shower them with more and more nonfiction. In science, social studies, math, and health, we assign readings from textbooks, magazines, newspapers, the Internet – all nonfiction, with which students in the primary grades have limited experience. Nevertheless, we expect our upper grade students to dive right in, reading up on all sorts of topics and retaining relevant information, often with very little help from us. Reading nonfiction is much different from reading fiction, and our students can benefit from some explicit teaching on how to approach this genre. The skills my fifth graders will gain by completing these read alouds are: recognizing print conventions particular to nonfiction texts, determining unfamiliar word meanings, comparing and contrasting information, and inferring information. Thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting your child with these read alouds!
Next week, we will be starting our science lab #9! We are about to finish unit 1, How Scientists Work. My plan is to move to renewable and nonrenewable resources next and science research.
Students are currently working on Colonial America for social studies. Students are working in groups investigating the New England, Middle, and Southern Colonies. They will attend a “Colonial Fair Trade,” and convince other people to come live in their colonies. Also, during the first quarter, fifth graders became cartographers by designing their own maps. This was a fun project for them.
Pretty soon we will enter unit two, nouns, for English. We have a few more lessons to complete still in unit one. We are also learning how to write fancy topic sentences during writing.
Students continue to learn and enjoy Greek/Latin derived words; they are also learning Spanish vocabulary.
Parents thank you for all your support and hard work during this successful first quarter.
Mrs. Long
One of our favorite writing activities: Cookies - teach us to use our senses.
Reading is pretty important in our room. Below we are testing our reading stamina. 
Kids were determined to show me they have stamina when it comes to reading.
Dominic enjoys sitting in Mrs. Long's chair to read.
Below, we are testing our writing stamina - students are writing a fictional story about owls.
We love to perform science investigations in the fifth grade.
Completing Buzz assignments in language arts:
English assignment: Simple predicates while enjoying fresh air. We are using Kagan's Mix-Pair-Share to burn some energy.
We enjoy working in groups; we have each other's backs.
