I am truly grateful for the chance to live, learn, grow, and lead in 5th grade with you all this year! 5th grade is such an important time in a person's life. It is a time when we are beginning to chart our course as individuals, learning about who we want to be, how we want to be, and where we might spend our time. We begin to develop closer friendships and try out different interests and activities. We start to figure out how best to work to achieve goals -- developing habits that can serve us as we encounter the uncharted territory ahead as we grow.
Literacy Learning: Hero's Journey Stories
In our state standards for ELA, we are charged with: analyzing thematic development; analyzing relationships among ideas, themes, and topics; analyzing the development of characters, setting, events, and ideas in literary texts in written and multimedia form. Hero's Journey stories offer us the chance to study and practice these types of deep analysis in a genre that will also serve where we are as people. These stories have patterns in them that can inform our choices as we take on challenges of daily life. Heroes in these stories rise to meet their challenges, simply put, by paying attention to their surroundings, developing a goal and aiming at it, then sacrificing their time and energy toward achieving that goal. This is a frame we will use to understand the stories we read and write, but equally to understand ourselves as we begin working hard toward our growth as 5th graders.
As a function of this, we will read and write Hero's Journey stories at school. I will be sending home more information about this writing piece as we get further into the unit. Please keep an eye out for the blue folder and homework assignments associated with this literacy focus for us. We will be enlisting your help as family members in: our weekly written conversations, helping us develop our plans for our writing pieces, and revising and editing as we begin drafting those pieces.
Math: Place Value Patterns & Homework Update
Our Math Unit for the next few weeks will focus on place value and the patterns we can find in the chart. We have already started discussing what happens to a number as we multiply or divide by a power of ten (10, 100, 1000, etc.). We will move from here toward discussing decimals, fractions, and how place value changes as we move from whole numbers to pieces of the whole.
In regard to homework, though, our work will be happening within the MAP Skills program. It is a program connected to our MAP scores and tailored to our specific needs based on that assessment. Students will be working on items that will be connected to our work in the classroom, but sometimes, the content will vary a bit within those strands based on the assessments they've taken. You will be receiving instructions for logging on to this program from me on Monday in the blue folder. Please send any questions my way over email as soon as possible so that we can make sure that we troubleshoot any issues as quickly as we can together!
Science: Biomes & Food Webs
Our first content focus will be within the Life Science strand of our science work. This year we will be learning about relationships between animals and relationships between animals and their environments. We will learn about food chains, food webs, roles of animals and plants within those networks, biomes and their components (living and non-living parts), and populations/communities of organisms. This learning will happen through a few different engagements. In our classroom, we will be using your generously donated soda bottles to create terrariums that will offer us the chance to experiment directly with a functioning mini-biome. We will use some of the knowledge we gain through that to then apply our learning to a project that we will begin researching in class. This project will involve the creation of a diorama (scene in a shoebox) and poster explaining it. Stay tuned once again in email and the blue folder for the requirements for that project. It is another one that we will complete most of at school, but some parts will be done at home and brought in before the due date.
