5E News 1

5E NEWS Jan. 26, 2018

Exams & Projects This week brought a Revolutionary War exam on

Friday (today!), and as another wrap-up of our Revolutionary War unit, students also completed timelines of major events in the American Revolution. Your child should have finished his or Young Author book by now, since we are now researching for president reports!

A Quick Reminder… ***Don’t forget that we are still collecting Box Tops for Education. Just send them to school in a baggie with your child. Our last collection bought supplies for science projects, and paid for part of our Flocabulary subscription, which we use frequently! Thanks, and keep up the great collecting!

One Last Reminder… We have been collecting items for “Blessing Bags” that students in the service club are putting together. Since Monday, Jan. 29 is the 100th Day of School, we are collecting 100 individually wrapped food items (such as granola bars, fruit cups, peanut butter and crackers, and oatmeal packets) at the 5th grade level, but feel free to donate any of the items listed , if you would like. These bags are to help the homeless, so I’m sure they would appreciate whatever you can provide. Thank you!!!

What We Are Doing: Math: We continued our geometry focus this week as we analyzed solid figures, created tessellations, and further discussed angles and plane figures. After our little geometry interlude, it is back to the wonderful world of fractions! The students practiced writing detailed explanations of their problem-solving strategies as we solved a variety of math problems during our morning math time, and, of course, they completed a problem-solving quiz just today. Science: After wrapping up our gravity unit last week, we began a new unit focusing on matter. So far we have examined properties of matter and the periodic table of elements, and students also conducted experiments on density and buoyancy. Social Studies: This week in social studies was spent wrapping up our Revolutionary War unit, creating timelines of the revolution, and reviewing and taking an exam! Now that we have concluded our focus on the war, we will begin delving into the government that our country set up after winning the American Revolution.

Reading: During this past week the students continued reading historical fiction novels set during the American Revolution as they summarized major events, analyzed new vocabulary words, and discussed conflicts, inferences, figurative language, and descriptive words. Next week we will revisit plot analysis and theme prior to concluding these novels so that we can once again examine some nonfiction. After that, we will jump into some mysteries! Language / Writing: The students completed their Young Author books last week, so we are now researching for our latest project, the president report, which we will be working on for several weeks as students learn how to cite sources, develop an outline, and create a research report. They also wrote short “Winter Olympics” papers, and composed V.I.P. reports about this week’s VIP student, which was Tyler Hoss. Spelling: This week we returned to our Words Their Way groups as students examined words with silent letters, words with prefixes, or words with adjective suffixes. Hopefully, you saw your child practicing one of these lists throughout the week.

5E News 2

Important Upcoming Dates

and events

Wed., Feb. 14 Late Start

Wed., Feb. 14 Valentines Parties at

1:30

Mon., Feb. 19 Presidents’ Day – No

School

Tues., Feb. 20 School Improvement

Day – No Student

Attendance

Sat., Feb. 24 Prairieland Carnival!!

4:00-7:00

If you have any questions or concerns,

please feel free to contact me at home or at

school. My home number is 663-8001, the school

number is 557-4424, and my school email address

is elstonjr@myunit5.org. For any homework

questions, you may want to check out our

classroom website!

Mrs. Elston

Re-Designing Mars Landers!