Fifth Grade October Newsletter, 2017 - AWS
Fifth Grade October Newsletter, 2017
Hello Parents! Welcome to a new school year! We are looking forward to a wonderful and productive year with your students. Read below to learn about important dates, units of study, advisory, and more! Important Dates Monday, October 9th, Columbus Day, NO SCHOOL Tuesday, October 10th, District 20 Middle School FairFDR High School Tuesday, October 17th, District 15 Middle School Fair-MS 88 Tuesday, October 17th- Fifth Grade Picture Day Friday, October 20thPS 230 Hoedown, Yee haw! Tuesday, October 24th-27th, PTA Pumpkin Patch Tuesday, October 31st- Character Parade
Reading and Writing
In reading workshop, students are working on identifying signposts in fictional text. When students identify a signpost, they should stop and think about the anchor question to deepen their understanding of characters and themes. Going forward, they will continue this work in their independent reading books. In class, we are reading a book titled, Home of the Brave, a novel about one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. While students will continue to identify signposts and use them to deepen their thinking, the focus now shift to increasing our reading stamina and improving our writing reflections. Fifth graders will be working in book clubs, which will encourage them to share their thinking with partners. We will be discussing themes and how to select the best details to support those themes. In writing workshop your students are working on crafting their thesis statements for their literary essays. Fifth grade writers are being pushed to think deeply about their books, make a claim, and support that claim with evidence from the text. Students are choosing from a wide array of books to write their essays about, and we can’t wait to hear their opinions! As you can tell, both our reading and writing units are fiction. Please support your child at home by helping them read fictional chapter books and talking to them about their reading.
Math Our fifth grade mathematicians are near the end of their multiplication and division unit. Your children have pushed and flexed their math thinking in multiple ways. They have done this by solving two and three digit multiplication and division word problems through group work and postering. Some of the strategies your students have explored are: partial products, partial quotients, ratio tables, skip counting, and the standard algorithms. Ask your students about these fifth grade math words, and what DISEQUILIBRIUM means!
Student Quote of the Month “Learning is a gift.” -Maruf Istiak, Class 502
Social Studies Social Studies in October will primarily consist of studying various indigenous peoples of North America. Included in these studies are Maya, Aztec, Inca, Pueblo, and Inuit. The focus of our studies will be understanding how geography and climate impact culture and the ways that societies develop differently in different places. As always, vocabulary development will be a major focus in our Social Studies content. Students can also be expected to complete some type of project to show their understanding and these projects will vary from class to class. As the unit launches across the various classrooms, ask your children what their social studies wonderings are!
What is ADVISORY? Your child may have told you about an exciting new initiative at PS 230 for fifth graders, ADVISORY. Every other Friday your child will meet with a teacher who is not their homeroom teacher and children from different classes to talk about Fifth Grade topics. This is a chance for your child to form a positive relationship with an adult besides their family or teacher, meet students from other classrooms, and have a space to discuss anything that may come up throughout the school year, such as what’s going on in their social life, their homework load, or anything else. We are looking forward to this new program and getting to know more students!
Science This school year our 5th grade scientists will be doing many hands-on science investigations. We have begun by getting our science notebooks organized and every 5th grade scientist has a role in their groups! Our first unit of study is called Variables. We will explore how scientists conduct experiments by following a set of procedures!
Technology Technology curriculum topics that 5th graders will study this year include Applications Review (Microsoft Word/Microsoft PowerPoint), Digital Citizenship, Typing (By the end of 5th grade, students should type 20 words per minute), G-Suite, and Creation Tools. All students will be given a Keyboarding Without Tears account. We encourage students to use their accounts at home for no more than 10 minutes a day. Parent G-Suite Permission Slips are due by 10/6. Feel free to email me with any questions: [email protected].
