Week of February 6th

Tyler, Sam, and Thomas went to Bozeman for a Lego Robotics tournament last weekend! Their team took 19th out of 75 teams. Way to go guys!!!

There are few things I love more in life than Thomas and tie dye!

Cannon the super-cleaner!

Cute girls making hearts out of the snow! 

We are moving on to Unit 4 in Wonders this week. We will answer the essential question: What choices are good for us? We will be reading several different folktales, including "The Real Story of Stone Soup" and "Nail Soup." We will also be reading the Expository text "Healthful Food Choices." We will be working on the skills of asking and answering questions, point of view, linking verbs, and correctly punctuating sentences.  

Our vocabulary words this week are:

Our spelling words:

In math, we will continue with Chapter 9: Comparing Fractions. Please encourage your child to work on their multiplication and division facts at home. This helps tremendously with long division in fourth grade. I remind students regularly that they should recall their facts FLUENTLY!

Our wonderful room mom, Holly, has gone to a ton of work organizing/planning our Valentine's Day celebration, which will take place on Thursday, February 9th from 10:35-11:45. If you would be willing to send in a needed item, it would be greatly appreciated. The link is:
https://signup.com/client/invitation/6775657374/1783353/false#!1783353/false/false

Lastly, students will have an opportunity to make a Valentine's Day bag at school. If they would like to decorate a box, that needs to be done at home. If your child chooses to bring valentines, they need to bring one for each child in the class. Addressing the envelopes and cards provides a wonderful opportunity for your child to demonstrate their best handwriting. Your child can bring their valentines to school starting Tuesday the 7th, so they can distribute them during "down" time throughout the week.

I sent a list home already, but in case it was misplaced, here are a list of kids in our class for when addressing valentines:

Code Word = Stone Soup

Week of January 25th

Last Friday we celebrated Kayoe's birthday. Kayoe is new to Arrowhead this year and we are SO lucky to have him in our class. He is super sweet, polite, athletic, and hardworking. And his smile makes my day! Happy birthday, Kayoe. And thanks for the yummy cupcakes, Toni! :)

Nathaniel went to Disney World and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter with his family in Florida last week. So jealous! He brought in some of the treasures from his trip to share with the class. 

Addison was my super cleaner this week!

I don't know why I took this picture, but I love that I actually documented a REAL smile from Tyton! :) And Jenna is pretty cute, too! ;)

We applied some real-world fraction situations with a Cookie Fraction activity on Tuesday! Most groups were stumped by the last scenario: Share 3 cookies among 4 friends.

We finally got our VEX IQ Kits out for our Simple Machines unit. We just explored and organized this week... Next week we will finally begin building! 

This week in reading is Week 5, which is the "review" week of Unit 3. We will spend our time doing a short Inquiry project, working on an opinion writing piece, and continue reviewing important grammar skills. I WILL be doing spelling this week, as there are high-frequency words students are often misspelling in their writings. So, we will work on those this "review" week. 

In math, we will move on to Chapter 9, which will focus on Comparing Fractions. This week we will work on comparing fractions with the same denominator, comparing fractions with the same numerator, and then ordering fractions.

In science, we will continue learning about simple machines. 

In social studies, we will focus our time on research for our Unit 3 Inquiry project. 

I hope everyone has a delightful weekend! See you Monday :)

Code Word = Reading Log Due

Week of January 23rd

Tyler and his cat, Buddy, getting lost in a good book!

TJ's mom, Angie, had her baby this week! Isn't he soooooo adorable?! Welcome to the world, Coy!

These cute girls matched and didn't even plan it! 

Dylan and Mya made the sweetest picture for me. Love you, girls!

This week in reading we are moving on to Unit 3, Week 5. We will focus on the essential question: How is each event in history unique? We have several history-buffs in our class, so I know students will bring lots of great background knowledge to this week's readings. The expository texts we will read are: "Riding the Rails West!" "Discovering Life Long Ago," and "The Long Road to Oregon." We will focus on the skills are summarizing, sequencing events, suffixes, and combining sentences with verbs. 

Our spelling words this week are: 

And we will focus on the following vocabulary words:

 

In math, we will finish Chapter 8: Understanding Fractions. So far, we have been working hard on representing fractions using a bar model, as parts of a group, using a number line, and with a circle model. We will dive deeper into fraction concepts such as comparing fractions and equivalent fractions in the following weeks.  Please keep encouraging your child to work on ST Math and Xtra Math at home -- it really does make a difference!

In science, we have learned about different forces and six different types of simple machines. The six types of simple machines are: Inclined Planes (ramps, slides, ladders), Levers (a bat, teeter totter, wheel barrow, light switch), Wheel and Axle (cars, bicycle, wagon, Ferris Wheel), Pulley (flagpole, window blinds), Wedges (ax, knife), and Screw (bottle cap, jar lids, light bulb). Simply put, simple machines make life/work easier. This week we take out the PLTW and begin building different simple machines, beginning with an inclined plane. 

This week for Social Studies, we will focus on the stories from our Wonders series to learn about our country's past. 

Several students are not bringing a snack or water bottle to school each day. Please make sure your child is bringing a healthy snack to school every day -- if they don't, they are starving by lunchtime! Thank you to the few families who have donate "extra" snacks to those students who bring any. This helps ease the burden for me financially a little, as I have spent A LOT of money on snacks for students this year. Long story short, snack donations are greatly appreciated ;)

Also, I have several students beating me to school in the morning. Technically, students should not arrive at school until 8:00, when there is a teacher to supervise morning walk. If you need to bring your child earlier than 8:00, please let me know so that we can figure out a plan. Thanks!

Please sign and return your child's report card envelope. And, as always, if you have ANY questions/comments/concerns, please call or email me.

Have a lovely, relaxing, enjoyable weekend! See you Monday!

Code Word = Inclined Plane

Week of January 16th

Upcoming Events

                   16 -    PIR Day - No School

                   19      5th Grade Band Concert @1

                   20      Report Cards sent home

                   23      5th Grade Orchestra Concert @ 1

                   24      Reflections Deadline!!!!

                   27      Family Fun Night at the Reef   4:00-9:00

                   31      5th Grade Spelling Bee at 8:30am

First of all, thank you to those of you that have reached out regarding my son Bennett's health. Over the break, we ended up in the ER three times and in the hospital for six nights. It was a loooong couple weeks, but he seems to be improving every day. Again, thank you for your well wishes and prayers. There is nothing worse than seeing your child suffering and not being able to do anything to help!

This week we celebrated Evan's birthday. I simply cannot say enough great things about that boy. He is clever, creative, funny, bright, and respectful. I just love being his teacher! He passed out cute treats and Star Wars pencils for his special day. 

On Thursday we celebrated the wonderful Nathaniel's birthday. If you know Nathaniel, you love his humor, warm smile, and fun personality. He is smart and kind and we are so lucky to have him in our class!

Tyton always cracks me up. This time I caught him playing his harmonica at recess.

Eden made a spectacular snow angel. 

This week in reading, we will be moving on to Week 4 of Unit 3. We will be answering the essential question: what ideas can we get from nature? We will read the myths "Perdix Invents the Saw" and "Bats Did it First." We will also read he expository text "Big Ideas From Nature." We will work on the skills of summarizing, determining the main idea, future tense verbs, and prefixes. 

Our spelling words this week are:

This week's vocabulary words are:

In math, we will continue learning about fractions. I don't love the Go Math materials for teaching fractions, so I plan on supplementing with quite a bit of other materials and resources I have collected over the years. 

With testing last week, we really didn't get to Science or Social Studies. So this week I promise we will begin our Simple Machines unit for PLTW.

Most students made AWESOME growth on their Winter NWEA and SRI tests. As I told the kiddos, you only become a better reader by reading. And you only become a better mathematician by working on math. So we will keep practicing and working hard for the remainder of the year!

I hope everyone has a lovely three day weekend! See you Tuesday! 

Code Word = Hello, Third Quarter!