Greeting families! We have had an excellent two weeks together and I hope your children feel like they are settling in to 5th grade.
Writing: We have been reviewing and analyzing our 6 traits of writing. I have been very impressed with what they remember from last year. We will start our first holistic piece of writing in a few weeks. There are a few more traits to cover and it is important we lay this foundation first. Ask your children about the Beetles song, "Hey Jude," they should have lots to share!
Projects: Social Studies: We dove right in this first quarter. This week we created our first Google Presentation of the year. It was a short two slides on the 3 Branches of Government and the 2 Houses of Congress. These were not graded. However, each student presented and we focused on the formatting of our slides (background, font, color etc), and the usage of Google as a tool rather than THE product. We also focused on the format we will be using to takes notes for writing, and projects and making sure we understand why this tool for organization is so important to us.
Reading: We have been reading Social Studies content based text for reading, as well as small narrative pieces. Our afternoon schedule is a little wacky, so we are just now into a rhythm and have most of our procedures down. We are also working on our spelling words twice a week during this block as well.
Community Service: Mr. Lenon is our new school counselor as well as our community service teacher. Ask your students about him. He is "really cool" (quote) and we are enjoying him very much.
Thank you for sharing these little people with me (I can usually only say that until Christmas when they are as tall as I am), I am enjoying them!
