September 4th Newsletter

5^th Grade Newsletter
Mrs. Sandusky’s Class

Important Dates:

·         9/7-Early Out (Fall Festival)

·         9/14- Mid-quarter

Monday	Music 1 (No school)
Tuesday	Art
Wednesday	PE 1
Thursday	Music 2
Friday	Computers

ELA (Sandusky)- No spelling words this week! This week we will be finishing up with figurative language and compare and contrast. We will be focusing on pronouns and quotation marks for our writing strategies. PLEASE, PLEASE make sure your child is reading at home in the evenings. ELA teachers will soon be sending home a reading log that parents and students must fill out weekly and sent back to school. (Just giving you a heads up!) I generally don’t assign homework so that way students have more time in the evenings to read.

ELA(Shultz)- his week, we will continue to work with the spelling words and letters from our last two weeks. We are discussing the different ways that the “er” suffix works with words (to mean “more” and “someone or something that does something”). We have discussed the importance of appropriate capitalization in our writing—specifically when capitalizing one’s name or the word “I.” All students will be responsible for remembering these two instances in all of their writing, all of the time. We are continuing with our lessons on compare and contrast (ways things are similar and different) this week. Find fun ways at home to compare and contrast your days, pets, meals, anything you can think of! Once again, we always ask that your student reads at home each night. If you have a student reading a chapter book, this is an excellent way to get an extra 20 pages read during the week. Or for a picture book, it is a great way to review and to be ready to test the next day! I encourage students to take a book home each night. 

 SCIENCE: We will have a test over CELLS on Friday. Look for students to start bringing home study materials on Wednesday. We will spend Tuesday through Thursday investigating body systems and their functions. If you would like the study guide emailed to you, please send me a request at jrichards@stjschools.org

Math: This week we will start Unit 1 on Order of Operations.  Students completed the pre-assessment for Unit 1 Aug. 20th, this week will be the beginning of teacher led instruction for order of operations.  On Thursday, students will take a Post-Assessment over 2x2 multiplication, basic long division (1 digit divisors), and adding/subtracting decimals. Students have been working in class on these skills since the first week of school, and in prior grade levels