Spring has Sprung and so has your 5th Grader!

Some of your children are now towering over me, most of them are looking me in the eye and some of them I can still tuck under my arm!  Not only are they growing in height, but intellectually I have seen so much growth!  We have been making sense and discovering so much about fractions, informational writing, the causes of the revolutionary war and famous colonists!  With only one week until vacation...I have been putting the pressure on these 5th graders to work hard, finish their assignments and to not rest until their good is better and their better is best!  By next Friday, we will be wrapping up our Colonial America unit, our historical fiction reading, Our 4th math unit, our joint production of Stone Soup with our book buddies (some of us have small parts and all of us will be singing!), and our research essays!  Next week's HW is a bit light. But, our math HW connects to our study of Colonial America and has a writing component!  Wow!  If you are leaving for vacation early, please let me know so that I can make sure your child has completed assignments before they leave!

Reading/Writing
    Most of this week was spent pouring over informational texts as we pushed hard to complete our flash drafts!  I have been so impressed with the 150% effort that your children have shown in completing this daunting and difficult task!  Mrs. Bushey, out literacy coach, came in on Thursday and read a few pieces! She was impressed by the content your children have gained from all of the nonfiction texts and historical fiction texts they have read.  This knowledge was evident in the chapters of their essay about the events and people that led to the American Revolution~ Revolutionary War!  They have been spending time revising these drafts by using maps to add touches of geography into their research, telling where important events happened, mapping out distances that were traveled, naming oceans, colonies and countries involved in the revolution!  They have also been adding analysis by thinking and speculating about their facts!

Math

A bulk of our week has been focused on Egg Crate Fractions.  By using as egg crate, string and 12 pom poms we have explored equivalent fractions as well as adding fractions with unlike and common denominators.  We have pressed one another with genuine questions, we have listened to understand one another's thinking and we have searched for multiple representations and pathways to justify our thinking! Next week we will be solving and writing our own fraction story problems and ending the week with our Unit 4 Assessment!  After vacation we will continue with fractions in Unit 6!

Our April calendar has been led to some meaningful conversations about volume and surface area and patterns.



Stone Soup  
Matthew, Emilie, Laragh, Lena A., Ezra and Manny have small roles in Joplin's class play of the classic book Stone Soup.  The rest of us have also been helping with the set and all of us will be singing, You Can't Stop the Beets!  I will send pictures and video next Friday!  This has been another fun way to support our Book Buddies in reading, singing and art!