Update

Dear Families,
    I hope everyone enjoyed the beautiful weekend!  I can't believe we are in the last 6 weeks of school!  I know that many of us are busy with sports, playing outside, lemonade stands, siblings, friends and family, but please find the time to work on a bit of HW each night and to do some nightly reading to the sounds of crickets and frogs!
   We have chosen to focus on our multiplication facts during the month of May.  Students are asked to study one fact family and then to try and pass a quiz on Tuesdays or Thursdays in 2 minutes! Some of us are moving along and feeling confident in our facts.  We lost touch with them as we focused on addition and subtraction but now as we unpack perimeter and area we are using our multiplication facts again!  Thank you for supporting your child in their use of flash cards, time on FasttMath or doing quick timed quizzes.  Your support means a lot to me and to your child!
    Math class has been filled with polygons, angles, intersecting lines and formulas for area and perimeter.  We will even talk about hexarights this week!  We have been finding properties of shapes (sides, parallel lines, angle measures, vertices, etc.) and have been talking about symmetry.  Does a parallelogram have symmetry?  Can you name a shape that has exactly 4 lines of symmetry?
    We have a break from Word Study this week.  Word Study will be wrapping up during the first week of June.  Next year we hope to differentiate our groups even more than we did this year.  If you have time daily Monday thru Thursday (like 130-2 or 930-10) and would be willing to join our Word Study team in 5th Grade, please let me know.  This will help Cara and I as we plan our schedule for next year and how we best want to meet the needs of our spellers.  We will be assessing students in the next few weeks to see exactly how they have grown as spellers.
    We are investigating the properties of matter and the conservation of matter in an inquiry science project involving mini lakes that we have assembled.  This unit will take us through the end of the school year.  Ask your child about it!
    We begin NECAP testing tomorrow, the last of the formal testing that we need to do for this year.  Your children persevered on our SBAC testing and I was proud of the effort they put into their work solving multi step math problems and writing opinion essays, narratives or informational articles!  NECAP testing only involves science and will have a hands on component as well as multiple choice questions.  We will be testing from 930-11 daily!  Please make sure your child has a healthy and filling snack and a good nights rest.  We will be dancing with Miss Niles to SPARK our minds before we test!
    On Friday we will travel to the  CIVIL WAR EDUCATION DAY AND ENCAMPMENT.  We will leave school at 9AM and return by 11:30AM.  Please make sure your child brings snack, a water bottle and wears sunscreen, it is supposed to be sunny!  On Thursday we will also be having a visit from a guest author!  We will celebrate the long season of testing with these two events!
   As always, keep in touch! Vasanthi