Student Led Conferences

This week we are going to have our student led conferences. Students have been busily preparing for the conferences the past several days.  Each student will walk their parents through a typical day and discuss goals that were set during the first SLCs. Students will be reviewing finished work samples that they have selected from their portfolios.  Please remember that SLCs are not parent teacher conferences.  Teachers will play a minimal role during the process.  If you do have a question or concern to address, Alexis and I are available everyday before school to meet with you.  We can also set up a phone conference call for your convenience.

I can't wait to share all of the amazing work that we have done!  This week we have been having our writers' workshop celebration.  Students have been reading their final drafts of their persuasive essays to the rest of the class.  I was amazed and very moved by how much the students have grown since the beginning of the year.  Since we have finished our persuasive essays, we are going to begin working on our letters to our heroes.  The letters will be due on April 10, the week after we return from spring break.

Student Led Conferences

Next week we are going to be having our second round of student led conferences. We will be having half days Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday next week.  This will be an opportunity for us to review our goals from our first SLC, assess progress, and look at current work samples.  Students will be busy preparing for the conferences this week.  Please follow this link to sign up your child 5th grade SLC sign-up sheet.

I am still in the process of collecting money for the Star of India trip.  Please make sure to return the completed packet as soon as possible.  I also need students to return the syllabus for the hero project.  Make sure that you read the expectations with your child then sign and return the packet.  Some students have lost or misplaced their packets, so if you need to print out an additional syllabus, please click on the following link Hero Syllabus.  The signed syllabus and three correctly sited sources are due Monday, March 18th.

This week we are going to be completing our final drafts for our persuasive essays.  Students who have not finished their rough drafts will need to take them home to finish.  Since the students will be using Google documents, you can log on with your child to check their progress and give some feedback.  Today I reviewed the publishing requirements of the assignment.  Each student needs to print out two final copies.  One copy will go into their portfolio and the other will be submitted for grading.  The persuasive essays are due Friday, March 22nd.

Star of India

This week we are sending home a packet for our Star of India overnight field trip.  We are going to be attending the overnight on Monday, April 15th.  Filling out the paperwork for going does take some time to complete but please try to return the packet by this Friday, March 16th.  If you are interested in attending on the trip, please complete the packet and return it as soon as possible since there are limited spaces available.  We will be taking volunteers on a first come first serve basis.  As always, parents are needed for driving so indicate whether or not you are available to drive.  The trip is going to be a blast and it will deepen our understanding of American History.

Last Friday we handed out the syllabus for our next project.  Please make sure the paper is signed and returned.  The first assignment was to find three sources of information about their heroes and site those sources correctly.  Some parents have been confused about the due date spaces being blank but we intentionally created that way so we can be flexible and create those with the students' input.  In the past when we had arbitrary due dates, it caused much anxiety. I will be posting the upcoming due dates for each section of the project each week on my blog so stay tuned. We are going to be starting the letters to heroes and important events timelines in the next phase of the project.  Our goal is to wrap up the entire project by the next exhibition night.

In class we have been busy this week working on our persuasive essays.  Each student is about halfway done drafting their rough draft.  Last week we spent our writing time pre-writing and planning out our essay.  Hopefully next week we will be editing and working on Google documents, so you will be able to log into your child's email and see their progress on their final drafts.

Hero Project

Last week we started a new project about heroes. Our essential question for this project is; What are the attributes of a hero and how can I be one?  Each student was asked to pick a hero and begin researching their life story.  We are planning on assembling all of the information into a book that we publish as a class.  Each student is going to be asked to join a cause or find some way that they can make a heroic change in their life.

One of the activities we are currently working on is writing a persuasive essay.  Students are picking a topics that they can persuade others to make small but significant changes in their lives.  Some of the topics are; carpooling to school, riding bikes to school, eating healthy foods, playing less video games, and working on getting along with siblings.  Our final product will be a 5 paragraph essay with a formal introduction, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph.

Now that we have finished Holes and Island of the Blue Dolphins, we have started reading our next novels in book clubs.  In order to maintain a high student interest level, we had the class decide and vote on which books to read.  The class voted on My Brother Sam is Dead  (a historical fiction about the life of a young boy during the Revolutionary war), and Anne Frank the Diary of a Young Girl (a story of a girl hiding out in Holland during Nazi occupation).