What a great week we have had. We are really starting to get into the groove
of learning in 5HD and really moving forward in what we are doing in all our
units.
Our math unit has covered how multiples of 10, 100 and 1000
work and also how division of the same work – all within the place value
chart. One thing you might want to aware
of is that I have taught students that a decimal point does not move. In fact, it is the digits that move their
place value when multiplied by decimal fractions. I do not encourage the use of the term, “Move
the decimal” as it is misleading. So far
the class has seen how this work and I am confident that as we continue we will
get more familiar with what is really happening. The last thing we did this
week was a start at exponents within the framework of decimal fractions.
Our first writing unit on Narrative Craft is all about
writing moments in our history. Learning
about sentence structure and elaboration is part of this unit as we try to
really make these small moment stories come alive. We have started a list of possible writing
ideas and continue to add to this every day that we write. I have encouraged students to ask parents and
other family members to help them remember some of the details where they may
be “fuzzy or forgotten”. Our first
published piece of this will be our Book of Moments which is taken from the
poem Book of Hours by Joyce Sutphen.
This will be the goal for next week.
After that we will pick one piece and really polish it off with details,
dialogue and writing from the eyes of the character.
Our reading is on track as we think while we read. This is something that I will be promoting
all year long as it is important as students now progress from physically
learning to read to interpreting and deeply understanding all the reading
students do. I have been happy with the
reading journals they are doing every night and want to keep this up throughout
the year. Reading should be something
that people do every day and not connected with either home-learning or
required pages/time. We are just
learning about “just right” books now so look for this in the conversation in
the future.
Our unit on Global Citizen ship show some interesting starts
with learning about our beliefs, values and abilities and how these affect our
ability to be global citizens. I had the
students to a close activity this week where they had a group of words and had
to put them in a sentence that shows what we might learn in this unit. The actual sentence is, “People’s beliefs and
values influence their ability to be an affective global citizen. One of the pictures in this week’s post shows
the results of their activity. The
discussion after was very deep and revealing.
We had our first work on Seesaw this week with our
introductory post and also a post on digital citizenship. You should be able to see these on your
students account. You can leave notes
for them and encouragements on their account but please be aware the system
requires me to approve these prior to be available to your student. I usually try to get to this once a day, but
sometimes other things get in the way and it a couple of days before it is
there.
Tuesday is our class picture day and all I ask is that
students come looking clean and tidy.
These pictures are used for both the school’s information system and
also for the yearbook at the end of the day.
If you want copies of the pictures, please send in the picture form and
money by Tuesday so I can give them to the school’s photographer.
I am looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible
next Tuesday evening for Back to School Night.
The schedule is on the ES Web Page.
AS this night will include a very large number of adults, we ask that
students stay home. There simply is not
the room to have them along with 42 adults.
That is it for this week.
If any of you have questions or concerns, please email me and I will
gladly set up a time for us to meet.
