Watershed Alliance Visit

Today the Watershed Alliance educators visited our classroom and gave us a preview of the tools we will use to collect data about the McCabe's Brook!  We will be conducting a physical, biological and chemical assessment to decide if the McCabe's is healthy!  Ask your child about these three assessments! 

1st Day of SBAC and Science

Your children showed tremendous perseverance, focus and stamina today for our SBAC testing.  We have started with English Language Arts.  Your open minded children enjoyed many of the reading passages and were telling me about all the interesting facts they learned about animals, history and science!  I have to say the SBAC test does a nice job of finding engaging text to use!  Nobody finished this first test and I praised them for that.  We will continue our work tomorrow with English Language Arts.  On Thursday and Friday we will work on the second part of the English Language Arts test which involves reading many passages about a topic and writing a longer informational, opinion or narrative piece!  We hope to have both tests complete by Friday!

Many of your children talked about our Matter Unit at Conferences.  Here are some photos of the experiments we did to test if kitchen substances were acidic.

We have begun our final unit of the year involving Ecosystems!  We have read many picture books about ecosystems and our vocabulary list is growing quite long.  Some of the words we will focus on are:

Food Chains, Carnivore, Herbivore, Omnivore, Consumer, Producer, Abiotic, Biotic, Prey, Predator, Cycle, Erosion, Pollution, Adaptations, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Oxygen, Turbidity, Physical, Chemical, Biological, Pervious, Impervious, Best Management Practices, Point Source and No Point Source and Watershed.  Today educators from the Watershed Alliance joined us at took us through the Lake Champlain Watershed.  We used a watershed model to explore the use of our lands in and around waterways.  We looked at how pollutants travel into our our waterways and ended the session looking for ways to reduce pollution.  

Lastly,here is a slideshow of some student writing involving the word Respect!  

Already half way through March!

I am looking forward to meeting with many of our families this week and next week!  Thank you for finding time to visit the classroom and listen to your child speak and reflect about their learning!


Here are two science experiments to spark some conversation at home about air!

What happened when I blew up the balloon?  What does the scale tell us about air?

Why does the water leave the bottle like a fountain?  What does this tell us about air?

It has been way too long!

Dear Families,

     I hope this blog post finds you all healthy and happy!  We have been learning so much here in 5th Grade and we continue to work on being a focuses, engaged, respectful and responsible class of learners!  Many of our mornings the past week have been focused around the olympics and the events that we have watched and been proud of!  We also took the time to get to know a few olympic athletes and para-olympic athletes!  We saw that many of these athletes have practiced perseverance, impulse control, precision and accuracy and resilience!  They have all faced challenges and set backs and have maintained a positive attitude as they move forward!  

We shared Valentines last week and enjoyed a few homemade treats from Kaleb and I.  We spent the afternoon playing with our 1st Grade Mix it Up Buddies!    

 We have begun a science unit on Matter (Solids, Liquids and Gases).  We kicked off our unit with a BrainPop video!  We continue to practice our note taking skills and have also been reading about matter, the three states of matter, how matter can change and how we can describe matter based on its traits/characteristics.  As a bonus, Vasanthi's class got to make Slime with Jacob's Mom!  As we made slime we noticed the traits of the ingredients, we measured the weight of each ingredient and then saw that the mass was conserved as we mixed all of the ingredients together, cool!  We also had to work as a team, compromise, listen and take turns as we made our slime!  Thank you Heather and Jacob!

 A few weeks ago we enjoyed an extra recess in the fresh snow!  Our bellies were full from a special Pizza Lunch thanks to Ella and her Mom!

In Math class we are wrapping up our Decimals Unit!  Students have worked hard to meet the goals of this unit, you can see them here!  Ask your child about it!  Thank you to those who have been encouraging your child to stay focused with Reflex!  Many of us are on our way to being 100% fluent with our multiplication.division facts!  This is a great activity to keep up with over vacation, too!

In Reading and Writing Workshop your child has been busy researching a country and working on writing an informational chapter book!  Ask your child about it!

Stop Drop and Read! SteamPunk Fashion Show by Middle Schoolers