5-2 Updates ~ 1/21

Hello 5-2 Parents ~

Another short, cold week in front of us...kind of making me long for those long, warmer days!!  Hope you enjoyed all the extra time spent with your kiddos this month :)

Important Dates

Talent Show ~ Friday, January 24th ~ We have 36 talented, creative, and interesting acts that have been put together by the 4th and 5th graders this year!  Students will perform for the school audience from 1:15-3:30 on Friday afternoon, then again for families at 7:00pm.  Hope you will make some time to come out and watch the amazing talent OMS students have to offer!  They can bring their props and costumes to school in the morning, then they will be given time to change and prepare before the performance.

Everybody Counts ~ Tuesday, February 4th ~ Everybody Counts is an organization dedicated to the empowerment and independence of people with disabilities.  Volunteers take the time to come into classrooms to help the students understand life with a disability in a powerful and engaging way.  THANK YOU to all the parents who volunteer in bringing this valuable program to our school  Our presentation is scheduled for Tuesday, 2/4 at 1:15.

Water Reclamation Treatment Facility ~ Friday, February 7th ~ In line with our science curriculum on Watery Earth, we have a Community Education Specialist  from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago coming in on 2/7 at 9:00 to teach students about how water is cleaned and pumped to homes and business in the area, as well as how wastewater is treated and cleaned after it leaves our homes.  This is a free in-school field trip, so you won't need to send in anything!

Math

We continue to work our way through Unit 6, and just finished up with data and graphing on Friday.  The students will return on Wednesday to take a mid-unit quiz, then we will finish up the unit focusing on adding fractions with unlike denominators.  Our Unit 6 Assessment is scheduled for Wednesday, January 29th.  As always, an additional study session will be offered during lunch and recess the day before the test is given.  Please encourage your child to attend the study session if they have struggled with any of the concepts in this unit.  

Science

Our class is participating in an online pilot for our Science Companion Watery Earth unit.  They were taught how to log on this week, and how to access both the online science journal and textbook.  We did discover some bugs in the system along the way which was frustrating for some students :)  The writers of the curriculum appreciate their feedback, and their comments will help improve the program before releasing it to the public.  Students will be using this online pilot while in the classroom, but they do not have to use it at home.  They may take home their science textbooks and journals if necessary.  However, they do have access to both the textbook and journal at home if they would like to access the work electronically.

We discussed a couple of the types of water we have on this planet available to us - surface water (both fresh and salt) and groundwater.  Students also built a model of groundwater this week in science.  Ask your students what groundwater is, where it is stored, and how water gets to the place where it is stored.  These are the types of questions that will be on their final unit assessment, so we will continue to review the concepts.  This week, we will move on to frozen water and water vapor.

During this unit, your child will need one clean 2-liter bottle, cut in half separating the top from the bottom.  Please send in this bottle by next Friday, 1/24.  Thank you!

Reading

We will finish up Unit 3 Week 4 on Friday this week so packets and spelling are due on Friday morning - we will also be testing that morning.  We are comparing and contrasting characters in a fictional story, and deserts in informational text; and we continue to work on the skill of summarizing.  Next week, we should be back to a "normal" Monday-Friday schedule, so the kids should breathe a sigh of relief - they don't seem to be enjoying the change of routine!

Writing

We were able to start reading The Liberation of Gabriel King this week, and the kids are really enjoying it!  They are engaged in the text that explores the themes of racial discrimination, and have been asking excellent questions during the discussions.  They wanted to know who was president at this time and allowed such horrible things to happen.  It's a beautiful thing to listen to the innocence in their comments and questions when this type of discrimination took place not so long ago.  

We are reading this book to produce a Response to Fiction Essay.  In these lessons, students write numerous journal entries in which they explore their responses to the reading, learn to describe their textual observations, and practice new writing skills.  We started this week by brainstorming observations we make in life of people when we first meeting them, and the impressions those observations leave us with...and we drew a correlation to meeting characters in a book.  Just like we observe people in real life and write about them, we can observe characters in a novel and write about them.  The difference is, we can only observe what the author has written down for us. 

"Every child is a different kind of flower, 
and all together make this world a beautiful garden."
~ Annonymous~

Stay Warm!