February 3rd 2014

5th Grade Newsletter
February 3rd, 2014

Upcoming Dates:

• February 3-6; Parent Teacher Conferences
• February 7; No School
• February 11- 5th Grade Science Night (info coming soon)
• February 12th; DARE Review with Officer Jones
• March 11th- Spelling Bee
• March 13- ALL AR GOALS DUE
• March 14- DARE Field Trip

Parents:

• If school is canceled, Parent Teacher Conferences will be rescheduled for another time.
• Students will be going outside for recess unless the temperature is 20 degrees or below. Please encourage your child to dress weather appropriate, for they will be going out unless there is a doctor’s note.
• Science Packets will be covering Weather and the Water Cycle this week, they are due on Thursday, February 6th. (If students are going to music auditions in the mornings, they are responsible for making this up at a time outside of class.)
• Students will be taking their 50 state test on THURSDAY this week. This is week 2 out of 3 in which they will be able to test in provided classtime.

Homework: We have finished with the sections of the United States. The next three weeks we are going to work on labeling all of the states. Once a student has successfully labeled all the states they do not have to take the test.  We will be giving tests on Thursday.

MATH:

Mr. Siders - We will continue working through our unit on fractions.  This week we will be working on adding like fractions and reducing/simplifying our answer into simplest form.  GCF (or Greatest Common Factors) is another part that goes hand-in-hand with reducing fractions so it will be learned as well while we work through this section.

Students have been doing amazing on taking a fraction (like 3/28) and turning it into a decimal and a percent.  There are so many real world applications for this that I encourage you to practice this with your students.  Examples:  February 3/28 (3rd out of 28 days) to find the decimal and percent we are through the month.  34/365 (days in the year), etc….  

Ms. Blankenship - We are continuing our unit on fractions. Last week we covered converting improper fractions to mixed fractions as well as mixed to improper. The students did so well! You will see their quiz score during parent teacher conferences.
       This week we are focusing on converting decimals to percents, percents to decimals, decimals to fractions, percents to fractions, and fractions to decimals. We will also be working on finding the greatest common factor of two numbers which will lead into reducing fractions.

Mrs. Watson- Students will have a multiplication test on Tuesday, January 21st. It will cover whole number and decimal multiplication. We will start our unit on division at the end of the week. We will also be learning about graphs and odd and even numbers.

If you have questions or concerns please email your student’s math teacher: nsiders@stjschools.org, bblankenship@stjschools.org, or swatson@stjschools.org. You can also visit the class web pages http://stjschools.org/fifth-grade/ for games and other sites to help review.

ELA: Mrs. Kemnitzer and Mrs. Shultz: Mondays are our library days. Please help your student remember any books from home he or she has through the week so that we can have new books to read. Students should be reading at home as often as possible. Practice makes perfect! Students should be at about 33% of their AR goal in order to stay on track to reach their goal. Students finished reading Monday With a Mad Genius and took an AR test on Friday. This week, in nonfiction reading we are focusing on the author’s purpose for writing. In fiction, we are reviewing several different topics including: point of view, figurative language, and compare and contrast. Please remember, if you ever have questions or would like to contact Mrs. Kemnitzer or Mrs. Shultz you can do so by writing a note in the red folder, calling us at 265-2300 x4292 or emailing dkemnitzer@stjschools.org and kshultz@stjschools.org.

Sandusky: Reading Logs this week will be due on Thursday. We will be studying sentence structure (L5.3), and taking a post test on Thursday. The only way to practice sentence structure is to test out different ways to combine and rewrite sentences. We will be doing a lot of Kagan activities with this standard so students can see how one sentence can be written in multiple ways, and still be right! Students are still blogging on their Book Club books (historical fiction), and answering text feature questions with their groups. Small groups are being pulled from Benchmark Results to help students in their area of need.

Engelbrecht: In Language this week we are finishing comma rules we will posttest on Tuesday.  We just ran out of time last week to posttest. We will be working on sentence structure. Reading logs will be due on Monday, students need to read two hours at home and have a parent sign the log. Reading logs are worth five point every week. In reading we are comparing two texts, Little House on the Prairie and You wouldn’t Want to be an American Pioneer.  We will also be reading Folk Stories and discussing the theme inferences, and character traits.  If you need anything or have any questions please email me at lengelbrecht@stjschools.org.

SCIENCE:
Mr. Siders - Weather and the Water Cycle tests will be going home at parent teacher conferences.  Students did great on the unit and learned a lot of great things.  We will begin our next science unit next week.

Ms. Blankenship - This week we will be continuing our unit over Weather and the Water Cycle.

Mrs. Watson- This week we will begin our unit on weather and the water cycle.

Week 6

	PE 1	Art	Music1	PE 2	Computers	Music 2
Monday	Blankenship	Siders	Shultz	Sandusky	Engelbrecht	Watson
Tuesday	Siders	Shultz	Sandusky	Engelbrecht	Watson	Blankenship
Wednesday	Shultz	Sandusky	Engelbrecht	Watson	Blankenship	Siders
Thursday	Sandusky	Engelbrecht	Watson	Blankenship	Siders	Shultz
Friday	Engelbrecht	Watson	Blankenship	Siders	Shultz	Sandusky