Blog Post Week of September 18th-22nd, 2017 

5th grade Blog- Week of September 18th-22nd, 2017

Driscoll/Tem  Humanities

This week students worked with partners, and independently, on identifying main idea and key details from nonfiction passages. Students used a graphic organizer to show the relationship between key details and main idea. Students read articles such as “Why Matter Matters,” “Matter Can Change,” “What is Energy?” and “Evaporation and Condensation.” Mr. Chapuis visited and facilitated an activity around finding pros/cons in an opinion article about textbooks and tablets in school, asking students to create a persuasive powerpoint presentation sharing their opinion. Students also completed their first reader’s response entry in their online journal. Students were also pulled for individual reading pre-assessments to determine their current reading level.

Students began working on their online interactive notebook for our first Social Studies chapter, “Geography and Settlement of Greece.”Students participated in “powerwrites,” 1 minute exercises to practice writing endurance and observed their improvement. Daily Edits, exercises in editing grammatical/spelling mistakes, are a regular part of the writing block. Students also learned the difference between topic and main idea, as well as reasons for persuasive writing and facts to support their reasons. Students created a list of appropriate persuasive techniques and began brainstorming and working on a persuasive 5-paragraph essay on a topic of their choice, focusing on identifying their “claim” and recognizing it as their main idea.

STEM

In science we began our study of matter. We looked more closely at mass and volume of matter and how this affects the world around us. We also started to explore how molecules inside types of matter act. In math we continued to use the steps of order of operations to solve multistep problems. We also looked at deconstructing numbers to determine what prime and composite numbers mean.

Burkart/Walker  

Humanities 

• Identify key details in fiction text
• Distinguish between interesting information and key details in fiction text
• Justify the main idea with supporting details
• Reading pre-assessments

STEM

Gallion/Sanguino

Humanities 

• Identify key details in fiction text
• Distinguish between interesting information and key details in nonfiction text
• Justify the main idea with supporting details
• Reading pre-assessments

  STEM In science students have started to explore ecosystems.  Students have been researching the different living and non-living components of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.  So far we have looked at the ecosystems found in the ocean, pond, lake, desert, rainforest and we will conclude the week looking at the forest.  On Monday they will cast their vote for the ecosystem to study in depth this quarter.  In math we have started our decimal unit.  Students have been working hard to deepen their understanding of place value in decimals.  They have been exposed to modeling different decimal values and have been practicing writing decimals in written, standard and expanded form.  Students have continued to practice using the order of operations with their ipads as well.