Successful First Week!

Dear Families and Students,
 Endeavor 5th Grade has had an incredible first 3 days of school!  Together we have begun to unpack our daily schedule, taken the time to get to know each other, manage the cafeteria, welcome new friends to the team, meet some new teachers who will be joining us in our classroom, sign up for chorus and band and maybe even the SCS Spelling Team!  Every little part of our day is leading to establishing our sense of community and belonging with one another.  We still need to sign up for classroom jobs, move our room around so everyone can fit (5th graders are so much bigger than Kindergarteners, (my mind is adjusting;), enjoy favorite picture books and figure out Fastt Math.  Together we will get it all done and soon we will forget all it took to get things going!

Throughout these 3 days we have been establishing expectations for behavior and for the ways in which we will interact and with each other.  We have started a list of words that we hope we can use to describe our classroom and that we hope that you as parents would use to describe our classroom community!  Thanks to Mr. Lewis in PE and Mrs. Southworth in Music, some of the words are Support, Encourage, 100%, Safe, Teamwork, Kindness, Polite, Listen and Share! The discussion of the meanings of these words and the actions that go with them have been so mature! We plan to post these words in our classroom so that we can remind ourselves of what we expect of one another so that valuable learning can happen all day, everyday.  I feel that we are off to a great start!

Team Time has been the most exciting this week!  Together with Mrs. Crowther's class we  have been working on a name poster project!  Each student has created a name poster with their name in the center and special symbols in each corner of the paper telling us about themselves.  These colorful and well planned pieces of work will line the kiva walls so that it is apparent to all, that bright, sophisticated, creative and caring students fill our kiva space!  Today we also had our very first Snack Shack!  Both classes came together to munch and crunch while reading our digital version of Scholastic News!  We listened to a bit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and learned about the importance of this speech and its impact even 50 years later!  We discussed important vocabulary words like segregation, discrimination and equal rights!
If you would like to enjoy this article, go to Scholastic News! 

Enjoy this 3 day weekend!  Again, thank you for sharing your children with me and having them rested and prepared for each day of learning!  I look forward to next week as we talk about our Hopes and Dreams, begin Number Corner and continue to get to know one another!