5KC Class Blog

Weekly Newsletter Grade 5 Dates: 27-31 Jan. 2019                Dear Parents, Curriculum Information for this Week: Literacy: This week the students will continue their reading unit on the Fantasy genre. They will also continue working in their fantasy book clubs where they will discuss elements of fantasy, keep track of characters’ development and problems and identify internal and external character conflicts and themes that run through their fantasy books. Questions which you can ask your fifth grader, What book are you reading in the book club? Tell me about who has the power in the book and why? How has your character changed throughout the book? What theme do you see emerging in this book? Students will begin writing fantasy stories this week. The focus of this unit is for students to be able to elaborate their thoughts (while keeping a focus!), use transitions to move from one ide...

Weekly Newsletter Grade 5 Dates: 21-25 Jan. 2019                Dear Parents, Curriculum Information for this Week: Literacy: This week the students will continue their reading unit on the Fantasy genre. They will also continue working in their fantasy book clubs where they will discuss elements of fantasy, keep track of characters’ development and problems and identify internal and external character conflicts and themes that run through their fantasy books. Our daily fantasy read alouds will also continue. While the focus for the first week of semester 2 was on fantasy reading, the students will begin their fantasy writing unit this week by completing a writing pre-assessment. Math: The students will continue Unit 4: Place Value and Decimal Operations. Last week, the students reviewed adding and subtracting decimals and towards the end of the week they moved into multiplying decimals (whole number ...

Weekly Newsletter Grade 5 Dates: 14-18 Jan. 2019                Dear Parents, Happy New Year and welcome back to semester 2 in G5! We hope you had a relaxing holiday with your family and friends. Curriculum Information for this Week: Literacy: This week the students will start new reading and writing units on Fantasy Genre. The students will begin by doing a tuning-in to the fantasy unit by identifying the elements of fantasy. In the first part of the reading unit, readers will read alongside the characters keeping track of problems, identifying internal and external character conflicts and themes that run through fantasy books and history. Our daily read aloud will also be fantasy books. The students will begin their writing fantasy unit next week by completing a writing pre-assessment. Math: The students will continue Unit 4: Place Value and Decimal Operations. They will begin the we...

Weekly Newsletter Grade 5 Dates: December 17-21 2018 Curriculum Information for the Week: Literacy: This week students will wrap up their informational writing, focusing on sustainable energy. Information paragraphs follow the same format as all good paragraph writing, starting with a topic sentence, followed by FRED’s, and concluding with a “So what?” This week students will show what they know in their Writing on Demand Assessment. Math: As we move forward in our decimals unit, students are learning to add and subtract decimals.  We have multiple tools and strategies to help students develop conceptual understanding.  Students will show what they know about decimals by adding, subtracting, and rounding while shopping for a meal on Tesco.com Unit of Study:  Design Thinking is in full swing. Students have started making connections to energy consumption and climate change, and have begun their designs of a prototype to help reduce their dependence on fossil fuel...

Weekly Newsletter Grade 5 Dates: December 10-14, 2018 Curriculum Information for the Week: Literacy: Students will finish their informational writing, focusing on sustainable energy. Information paragraphs follow the same format as all good paragraph writing, starting with a topic sentence, followed by FRED’s, and concluding with a “So what?” Students will write a variety of non-fiction paragraphs: sequencing, compare and contrast, cause and effect, just to name a few! Math: As we move forward in our decimals unit, students are learning to add and subtract decimals.  We have multiple tools and strategies to help students develop conceptual understanding. As the week continues, they will choose ways that are most efficient to them. Unit of Study:  Design Thinking planning will start this week! The students will start making connections to energy consumption and climate change, and design a prototype to help reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, in order to ...

Weekly Newsletter Grade 5 Dates: December 3-7, 2018 Curriculum Information for the Week: Literacy: Students will continue to work on their nonfiction reading and writing units, which are integrated with our sustainable energy science unit. Students will continue to use hard copy and online texts about sustainable energy to improve their nonfiction reading and writing. This week the students will focus on choosing and researching one form of sustainable energy, including the pros and cons etc. They will begin to synthesize their research in an informative essay. All of this research will guide us to use the design thinking process in order to problem solve around climate change. Math: We are wrapping up our unit on coordinate planes. We are now bridging into understanding the decimal system. In this unit, students will grasp that the location of digits in decimal numbers determines the value of a digit. Students will also be using real-world problems in order to understand how t...

Weekly Newsletter Grade 5 Dates: November 12-16, 2018 Curriculum Information for the Week: Literacy: Students will be continuing their Nonfiction reading and writing unit.  This unit will be integrated with our science unit, so students will be using texts about sustainable energy to improve their nonfiction reading. This week we will focus on text structures and finding the main idea. Math: Students will be tuning in to coordinate planes this week. We will introduce important vocabulary, focusing on one quadrant of the coordinate plane. They will be plotting ordered pairs, as well as reading and interpreting data on coordinate planes. Students will continue to review our learning from Unit 1 and Unit 2 in the daily warm-ups. Unit of Study:  We will continue to work with the Sustainable Energy unit. Classes will continue to get into the labs working with circuits. The classes are all reading a non-fiction book on Energy. For more information and ways to suppo...