August 20th Newsletter

5^th Grade Newsletter
Mrs. Sandusky’s Class

Important Dates:

·         8/20- School Library Visit

·         9/7-Early Out (Fall Festival)

·         9/14- Mid-quarter

Monday	PE 1
Tuesday	Music 2
Wednesday	Computers
Thursday	PE 2
Friday	Music 1

ELA (Sandusky)- Students had their first spelling test on Friday! Overall grades were great! This week students will be writing their Fall Writing Assessment. They will be given the prompt on Tuesday and then will follow the writing process. The FWA is a completely independent piece without instruction, it gives us a good idea what the student can accomplish independently. We will also be working on poetic devices and figurative language. Monday we will have a pretest to determine what students know about the topic. It is NOT for a grade.
All students have an AR level and goal at this point. If you have a computer at home you can follow the directions that came home in this week’s folder with the heading ‘Renaissance Home Connect’. The sheet gives you your student’s login name and password. You can sign up for email alerts when your child takes a test; it allows you to look at the tests your child’s already taken, and to keep track of their comprehension and AR goal. It does NOT allow you to take tests at home. Please remember it is important for your child to be reading at home!
List 2
ear
race
ring
grind
glide
ranch
dance
racer
racing
glider
dancer
dancing
grinder
rancher
grinned
earring
children
grandchildren

ELA(Shultz)-. All of our hard work during the first full week of school paid off! I am currently in the trenches grading biopoems and I am very satisfied and pleased with how hard everyone worked. Many students were experiencing a “research” based project for the first time, but I think that we can all be proud of what was achieved during the first attempt. This week, we will begin discussing and reading poetry more. We will talk about figurative language and how poets and authors manipulate words to paint a picture. We will also be looking at the art of Joseph Cornell. This week, we will begin our spelling program as well.
I am really excited to be able to toss aside the idea of memorizing arbitrary words to move to a program of learning about how words are formed. In your student’s red folder, you will find a take home page with the letters we are manipulating this week. Please encourage your student to tear apart the letters and then to move them around to form anything from a 3 letter word to using all of the letters to make one big word. We will be putting the words on note cards and each individual will maintain a set over the school year. This way, we can sort words according to vowel placement, prefixes, root words…there are so many possibilities! The focus for this week’s lesson is er/est, meaning more and most and re, meaning back or again.
AR goals have been set, and I have given each student a wide range from which to read. I believe that in order to develop life long readers we have to give them the opportunity to choose and to be successful. I conference with students weekly about their books and will help them to fine tune how they find “good fit” books as we move along. Please feel free to contact me! There is also a Parent Connect Form on the way so that you can access your student’s performance in Renaissance Place. They will not be able to access tests from home

 SCIENCE:   Students did a great job with their egg drop last Friday.  Thanks to all those who participated.  This week we will finish our unit on Scientific Inquiry.  We will take a test on Friday, so you can be looking for a study guide on Thursday night.  If you would like a copy of the study guide emailed to you, please send me a request at jrichards@stjschools.org

Math: Students STAR Math tested today in math classes. We are going to have pre-assessment on Wednesday. The pre-assessment will be over Unit One material. The assessment will cover skills that we will focus on for the next few weeks. We will use the data from the assessment to set up our first, initial set of flex groups. The flex groups will start on August 28th. (next Tuesday) This week students will spend time in each math class wrapping up review concepts: place value (whole numbers/decimals), multi-digit multiplication, area, and perimeter.