It's a great time for a classroom update for all of the families in Room 16.
Let's start with the big ticket items first:
SCIENCE FAIR
All school Science Fair projects are due TOMORROW. Several projects came in on Friday, and the rest will be presented to the class tomorrow. All 5th grade teachers will be out of town on Tuesday at a county math conference, and the Science committee is setting up for the fair at 8:30am on Wednesday. Tomorrow is the deadline for all projects!
STATE REPORT
Students will check out books at the school library tomorrow morning on one of the 50 United States. This month students will complete a State Report on their chosen state. The choosing will be random. All documents students need for this report (to be completed by Wednesday, April 4) will be distributed in the morning. The next couple of weeks should be spent reading and note taking at home and at school. Students should always have their books and notes packets with them. There will be earlier check-in dates for notes packet completion (Mon, March 19) and rough draft work (Mon, March 26).
A 3-D project (at home) is to be completed by Tuesday, April 3.
Now, for the rest of your update, you can find this posted on our blog: http://proctor16.blogspot.com. Enjoy -
2nd Trimester Testing
We're over the hump of district testing. That took up a lion's share of our time last week. The students took their time and did their best and were well-prepared. So now we'll see how the results materialize and I will prepare to send home a detailed breakdown of their performance at the week's end, if not sooner. It just depends on how quickly I can organize all 29 reports to be sent home. I'm working on it.
We completed a Summative Midyear Exam and Theme Skills Test in language arts. Each assessment involved answering reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, and spelling questions. Students also completed reading fluency testing with me. The final piece of each exam involved writing a narrative.
The class also completed the CVUSD 2nd Trimester Math Test which covered decimal operations, algebraic expressions and equations, integers, and percent. There were a total of 35 items.
On all exams, the district's multiple measures for promotion / assignment has 70% as "meeting" minimum grade level standards.
Math
We wrapped up Chapter 17 on Friday. We dove headfirst into geometry a little over a week ago. Students learned many new vocabulary words and skills. We began learning about points, lines, and rays. From there, students used protractors to measure and draw angles. We classified angles and triangles after that. Students used a compass to construct parallel and perpendicular lines. We learned that the sum of all the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees and in the quadrilateral measure 360 degrees. The final lessons were on constructing polygons using a compass; congruent and similar figures.
This week we will review Chapter 17 and test out of it. From there, we'll move into more measurement and geometry as we study triangles. The next couple of chapters, actually, will move rather quickly.
Language Arts
We began Theme 5 midway through the week after completing the lengthy tests. We definitely need another 2 days to read "Interrupted Journey: Saving the Endangered Sea Turtle." We took a spelling pre-test on Friday and this week on Wednesday, all students who scored less than 100% will take a final spelling test. So, there will not be a new word list going home tomorrow. Rather, students will take home the list of words from this lesson and study up for Wednesday's test. These are words with Word Parts in-, out-, up- and down-.
Social Studies
We will complete a final project - Colonial Newspaper - this week to wrap up Unit 4 (Life in the Colonies). Everyone wrote news stories for homework on Thursday night. They are posted in the classroom. Up next, students will write an editorial in class tomorrow, as well as an advertisement and political cartoon.
This month we will enjoy a special on-site field trip presented by California Weekly, Inc, entitled "Walk Through the American Revolution." Parts will be distributed this week as well as instructions for costumes. Your child will be expected to come up with costume ideas for themselves and at the end of this month, you'll formally be invited to attend our presentation of the American Revolution. This was a great deal of fun last year. I have enlisted the support of Sabine Claussenius to prepare nametags and as scorekeeper for the presentation. I may need another parent or two to be available during the day to help with "battle scene" rehearsals. This will take place between 11:30-12:30 on Thursdays starting this week and every week until the end of March. Please let me know if you're available.
Science
Mr. Reynes kicked off our Life Science unit with a couple of exciting lessons involving microscopes and learning all about cells. The class extended the first Life Science lesson by making a Silly Cellular Simile filpbook. I'll have to post some pictures later this week on the blog. Students will have assignments to complete from Chapter 3 in our science book.
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