Halloween, P/T Conferences and Project Presentations

I have sent out many emails on these subjects, so a quick summary of this busy week:

Halloween - costumes are allowed.  No masks, at least for the school day.  For the parade is fine if they can see.  Our class party is at 2:00.  Colleen Colburn is organizing this, if you want to help, please contact her (354-7318), or me via email and I will forward it to her.  We need parents to bring food and some items for an activity and a game.

Conferences are Friday Nov. 1 and Monday Nov. 4.  Please email me a preferred time and I will schedule you.  If I don't hear from you, I'll schedule you anyway.

Project Presentations - Our Wax Museum project is shaping up.  We will present at the Churchill County Museum on Tuesday, Nov. 5, from 2:00 -3:00.  Thank you to all who have volunteered to drive.  I have overwhelming response on drivers, and thank you for that!  I will be contacting you to let you know how many kids I need you to take and the details of pick up and drop off.  If you are not needed as a driver, please come and see the presentations.  Bring family, friends, co-workers, the museum wants to get people in the doors.  If you know any relatives or descendants of the person your child is studying, I would love to have you invite them as well!

One more note about the project.  The kids need a costume that is historically accurate for their person.  I know this is really a job for the parents, very few kids can come up with a costume on their own.  I appreciate your help in this.  The costume will add a lot to our presentations.  A simple prop or photo is fine, but not needed. Costumes can come in this week, but we need them by Monday at the latest for a dress rehearsal in the classroom that day.  Also, many of you had made additional trips and calls to the museum. Thank you for that.  I know that this is a labor intensive project for the parents and I appreciate what you are doing to support your child's education.  I hope you will be impressed when you see these presented.  They are coming together nicely!

Character Matters Play, Thank yous, Writing Assignments

Today was the fifth grader's play, Character Matters.  The students did a brilliant job, but we owe many thanks to the Drama teacher,  Mrs. Missy Miller, and her helpers:  Mrs. Cherilee Sorensen with costumes, Mrs. Dana Barton with songs, and Mrs. Suzette Benecke with choreography.  They did a fantastic job on the set as well.  They worked tirelessly, well beyond the 45 minute class period twice a week to help the students put on an amazing performance.  Thank you also to Mrs. Anna Jessen who brought cookies for everyone!  What a treat!  It was so nice to have many parents and family members there on relatively short notice.  Having an audience makes it all real for the performers.

Thank you also to Monyca Jensen who sent in supplies for our classroom and refillable plastic water bottles for each student!  They are all labeled and your student will either bring it home or keep it in the classroom to use there.

The Book Fair is stocked with tons of great books.  It will be open all week. before and after school.

This week, we are starting two assignments that may need some parent involvement.  The first is in writing.  Writing has been challenging, and we are writing our last personal narrative from a prompt this week.  On Tuesday or Wednesday (or both nights), your child will bring home a printed out copy of his or her rough draft.  Please help with revisions and editing on paper.  Your child can then bring back the paper copy of the changes and make the changes on their chrome book.  I want the finished product to be the student's work, but I think some one on one help would really benefit these young writers.   Final drafts are due on Thursday, and most students should be done with a first draft for Tuesday afternoon.

The second assignment is in projects.  We have researched our people for our Fallon Wax Museum at the Churchill County Museum.  However, if your child finds he or she is missing information as they go to write their script, there are a few ways to help out.  Feel free to call Bunny at the museum, who will research specific questions like a birth or death date.  You may also take your child to the museum, where they can go to the research room and look for more information.  We can do internet research in the classroom if needed, but some of the people really don't have much information published online about them.  Also, your child will need a costume for their person, so keep that on your radar.

Let me know if you have questions about any of this.  It's a lot of info to take in.  I'll try to be more concise next week!

End of 1st Quarter, New Project

We had a great walk to the museum today and we learned a lot about the first families in Fallon. The museum staff was so helpful! We sure appreciated them spending so much time with us.  The next step is for each student to choose a person from Fallon’s history to research, which we will do in class on Tuesday.  We will go back to the museum on Wednesday morning, Oct. 16.  This is a change from the email that went out last week. We are going before lunch this time so that we have more time there.  We will leave right after recess at 9:30 and be back before lunch.  We will still have math and writing that day, just in the afternoon.

Because we are approaching the end of the quarter, we had auctions in the classroom today.  The students filled out applications for jobs, and each gets paid for being a student.  They save their money and we learn first hand about supply and demand by auctioning off a few food items and some other fun things.  We will have a few more auctions this week.  

With the end of the quarter, we are also at the end of our Drama class.  Our class will be performing for a large audience at the Book Fair family night on Monday, Oct. 21 at 7:00.  The family night time is from 6-8.  Please allow time for your child to get in costume before the 7:00 performance.  Mrs. Miller will give more instructions on exactly when and where to meet on that night.  But please plan to attend and enjoy the play and the book fair.

Also, with the walk to the museum and auctions this afternoon, I totally forgot to pass out reading logs.  Please have your child read tonight, even without the paper to fill out and sign.  They will have their reading log for tomorrow.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  Have a great week!

School Pictures and Projects

Just a reminder, fifth grade school picture time is Wednesday at 2:45.  A hard copy of the order form went home last week and there are many extras at the front desk.  There may have been a form emailed out last week as well.

We are finishing up our weather and climate project this week with our weather report presentations.  The students have been working in teams and have tracked the temperatures of a chosen city.  On Wednesday, they will present a weather report, including a severe weather report for their city.  They will go to a commercial break where they will promote their design to reduce the impact of this severe weather on homes in the area.  There is a lot of thought, precision, and creativity going into this project.  We will present on Wednesday and take a test on Thursday. 

Our next project will go back to Social Studies and is called Famous Fallon Friends.  We will research people who have had an impact on our community and what they did to contribute.  Next Monday, October 14, we will walk to the Churchill County Museum to kick off our project.  We will also return on October 17 for more research.  Our final presentation will be a Wax Museum, where your student will dress as a person in Fallon's history and present a memorized speech about his or her contributions to the community.  We are not in need of any chaperones for these walking trips, but please make sure your child has shoes to walk in and is dressed for the weather.  We will go right after lunch both days and will return to school about 3:00, giving us about an hour in the museum each visit.  We are expecting to learn a lot about our community with this project, and just in time to celebrate Nevada Day.

The end of the first quarter is quickly approaching.  I appreciate the hard work I see coming from your students.  I can seen growth in them already!  Thank you for raising them to be kind and work hard.  It makes a difference in the classroom.  Have a great week!

Week of September 30

We started the seventh week of school today.  At this time in the quarter, we are totally in the thick of things we are learning. In Reading, we had our first vocabulary quiz today.  Your child will create a study guide each Monday so he or she can study for the quiz the following Monday.  A few minutes each night ought to do it.  They have 10 new words to learn for the week.  In Writing, the students turned in their first personal narratives.  They were really good, a few made me laugh and a few made me a little teary.  Very sweet stories from their lives.  We are working on elements of narratives, such as sensory details, description, dialogue, and solid beginnings and endings.  Of course, spelling and sentence structure matter too, but they really take a back seat to the focus, organization and elaboration of the narrative.  We will continue with narrative writing this week, but we are taking time to share in author’s chair, which gives us a chance to really compliment our peers and learn from their work.  

In projects, we are planning our weather reports.  The students tracked the weather, now they will prepare a weather report from one of the cities they tracked.  They will need to make a chart and a graph to share with the class to explain the weather and trends for their climate zone.  They will also write a commercial for the design they made last week to reduce the impact of severe weather that might hit their city.  It has been fun to see the depth of their thinking as they work on this project.  

In other news, we are using Thera-bands on our chairs to keep wiggle feet moving and bodies still to work.  Personally, I think they are great.  The kids are doing well with this new feature in their seating.

Thanks to all of you for responding to your child in their parent journals, for purchasing supplies for their projects, for studying with your child, and most of all, for sending them here to our classroom happy and ready to learn each day.  This is a wonderful place to be, and each child (and family) contributes to that!

Week of September 23

We are off to a busy start of another week.  We have a few exciting things going on in the classroom this week.  In Reading, we are starting to read the book Tuck Everlasting.  This is a great book that should prompt some deep discussions in the classroom.  This book is very well-written; it will probably help your child as a writer as well!  We will use it to study figurative language. Your child will have a literature journal to fill out in the classroom each day, as well as ten vocabulary words each week.  Starting next Monday, we will have a quiz each Monday on the previous week’s words.  The students made a study guide, so they can study this week to prepare.

In writing, we are writing personal narratives, true stories from our lives.  We are revising, editing and completing our final drafts of our first narrative this week.  In projects, we have been learning about severe weather. This is the final week for your student to track the weather for his or her chosen city.  We will begin building the students' designs in the second half of the week.  The students are working in teams to build something to lessen the impact of a weather hazard in their chosen city.  We are learning some really interesting facts about weather.  

Life is good here in Oasis Academy’s fifth grade!  Thank you for all you do to support your child’s education.

Coming up this week

Welcome back after what sounds like a very busy weekend for our fifth grade families!  In our Community Circle this morning, most of the students said how tired they were after the events of their weekends.  Busy families! This week we will be starting our small group instruction in reading, writing personal narratives in writing, and tracking the weather in cities from around the world.  I appreciate how so many of you are helping your child find the books he or she is interested in.  With no school library, it takes a little more effort, and I appreciate your trips to the public library or making book purchases for your child.  Most of the students have books they are really excited to tell the class about.  That makes me so happy!  In writing, we are trying to live like writers by noticing the small moment stories of our lives.  We will be working with techniques to make these stories come alive with detail and importance.  In projects, we have been learning weather and climate vocabulary, and today we got in pairs and chose two cities to track and graph the weather.

This weather tracking will be done for 14 days, so this will have to be done at home on the weekends.  We have used Weather.com and we are graphing the high temperature each day, plus recording a few words about the weather, like sunny, cloudy, rainy, etc.  We will be learning about extreme weather conditions this week and designing a product to reduce the impact of severe weather.  Your child may come home Thursday with a few needed supplies for next week.  Also, we will have a test on the vocabulary words next week, so ask your child about these words at home.

We are halfway through the first quarter and the routines of the classroom and school day are getting established.  I sure appreciate the nice manners I see from the students in the classroom.  They are really a kind and considerate class.  I am really enjoying them.

Last thing:  Count Day is Thursday Sept. 19.  Attendance is really important on this day.  It is a street clothes day and students will be rewarded with a movie and popcorn in the afternoon.  Please make every effort to have your child at school this day.

Thank you for all you do to support our classroom learning!