This week we are going to be having our student led parent teacher conferences. These will be taking place during the afternoon on Wednesday November 4. If you have not already signed up for a time slot please contact me so we can scheduled a time to meet with you and your child. I still have some time slots available from 2:30 to 4:00. This meeting will give you the opportunity to discuss your child's progress as well as future goals you wish to make.

In our language arts curriculum we have continued to make progress in our writing fluency with our "power writes". The children have really been able to see the tremendous growth in their sustained writing. We have also begun to create our personal narratives. These stories are about some type of conflict we have had and how it was resolved. With the use of direct instruction and graphic organizers, I am confident that the stories will be great.

In math we are continuing to work with place value of decimals. We are ordering, adding, subtracting, and comparing them. As a warm up each day we are taking multiplication tests to make sure we understand our basic facts. I am pleased to discover that most of the students are pretty comfortable with them. This will allow for us to move on to more complicated math procedures such as division.

In our social studies project we are focusing on the American Revolution. We are currently putting science on hold so we can focus exclusively on this project. We are using time lines, creating books, and acting out these historic events. It has been a lot of fun so far.
Keep checking up with the blog and stay tuned for future announcements.

Sincerely,
Bill

There are a lot of exciting things happening in our class room these days and a few important upcoming announcements. Next week our class will be attending a field trip to Mission Trails Regional Park. There we will learn about 4 distinct ecosystems. We will be leaving on the morning of Wednesday, October 28th. We will return by early dismissal that day so we will not be eating lunch there. I imagine that we will need a snack and water at the very least so be sure to pack something to munch on. Also don’t forget to wear closed toe shoes and bring plenty of sunscreen and perhaps a hat.
Our class has begun working on our writing program that I went to training for a few weeks ago. I can already see that writing fluency has increased dramatically in the short time that the program has been implemented. We are working on creating powerful sentences and identifying key writing standards for fifth grade narratives. Ask your child about sentence “travelers, double whos”, and “triple deckers.”
For math we are continuing to work on place value for decimals and comparing them to percentages. We do this in a variety of different ways. Sometimes we play games to learn at other times we use independent skill sheets. We are also having daily multiplication skills to make sure that we have our basic facts in order to move on to more difficult concepts.
For our project right now we a focusing on the History of the American Revolutionary War. I decided that we are going to focus on social studies for our project time. After this project we will then switch to our ecosystems project.