5/6 Week 1

by | Sep 7, 2018 | In The Loop

La Lectura

Bienvenidos a un nuevo año de studios y descubrimientos en nuestra clase de 5to y 6to grado!

What a great start our school year! We loved hearing all the fabulous summer stories and adventures. We are so happy everybody got to enjoy in their own special ways and most importantly, have some fun family time! I was very impressed to see our 5th and 6th graders ready to start from day one. It almost felt like no time had past since the last time I saw them, in academic terms of course! Everybody has grown so much!!

This week we spent time going over routine and procedures.  Although many of our routines will remain the same, they will be having some changes. We will make sure we communicate these to families during curriculum night. This year students will be working at a faster pace, will have more responsibilities with regards to homework, and will bring their Spanish abilities to a full functioning academic level. Other literacy objective this week were to:

• Explain the importance to continue to build a successful community of learners, team players, collaborative and inspiring members, with strong work ethic and study habits.
• Share their experiences from the summer in oral and written form.
• Get familiar with materials and resources for literacy and science.
• Understand the use of technology in the classroom: Google accounts, use the Spanish keyboard, access our science portal.
• Understand expectations for our first reading club, Esperanza Renace.

One of the activities this week included making as many words in Spanish as possible using only the letters in students names.

Another activity was to create a comercial to advertise our school SWS.

 

We had so much fun celebrating Juliette’s and Evan’s birthdays this week! May all your birthday wishes come true!

 

 

Ciencias

Fall Science Overview

The FOSS Populations and Ecosystems Course explores ecosystems as the largest organizational unit of life on Earth, defined by its physical environment and the organisms that live in the physical environment. Students will learn that every organism has a role to play in its ecosystem and has structures and behaviors that allow it to survive. Students will raise populations of organisms to discover population dynamics and interactions over a range of conditions. They will learn that food is the source of energy used by all life forms in all ecosystems to conduct life processes. Reproduction, including limiting factors, heredity and natural selection are explored as ways to understand both the similarity and the variation within and between species.

 

Mathematics

Our objectives were:

  • Represent whole number, fractions, and decimals on a number line
  • interpret and write statements of inequality for two given positive numbers using the symbols < and >

Students should have taken their textbook and math journal home to complete their first homework assignment! pg.14 #2-12 (evens), 20. This is due Monday! Students are using their planners and should always have homework assignments recorded.

History & Geography

Our objectives were:

  • Read maps and globes using longitude and latitude, coordinates, and degrees.
  • Describe the three climate zones: arctic, tropical, and temperate.
  • Identify the Arctic and Antarctic Circle as imaginary lines on a map an the relative locations of the North and South poles.
  • Understand that maps created to represent Earth contain distortions.

English Writing & Spelling

Our objectives for writing were:

  • Learn expectations and procedures for working in our writing journal.
  • Complete some “writing ideas” pages in our journal.

Our Greek and Latin roots this week were:

  • aer: air, atmosphere
  • ambi/amphi: both
  • anim: spirit, soul, life

Specialists

Music

I’m excited to be back for a second year teaching music at SWS!
September will be an engaging month full of hands-on rhythm learning and skill development. We will review concepts and skills covered last year, and build on them with activities involving the theoretical knowledge of beat counts, notation, and time signatures brought to life with group instrument playing, rhythmic spoken word, singing, and movement.

Character Education

It was great to be back with this class! We had so much fun talking about what we did over the summer, and then we read the poem “Manners, for a child of 1918” by Elizabeth Bishop. Manners and kindness are our themes this month and we’ll do a few activities to practice what it means to have good manners (using people’s names, having a firm hand shake, using eye contact, and of course the basics like “please” and “thank you”).  Our quote is: No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. – Aesop
We also put together a packet for the novel we will read this fall, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. Several of the kids have read this wonderful novel and it will be fun to dig deeper into all the character ed topics this story encompasses: courage, standing up for others, doing the right thing even if it means putting yourself in harms’ way. We’ll be studying the vocabulary, answering comprehension questions, and doing other fun extensions like Reader’s Theater and more!

Art

It was great seeing everyone back at school this week in Art! It’s fun to see how much everyone has grown over the summer! This week in Art the students made self portraits, and as always, I’m impressed with the artistic ability of this class. Their wonderful drawings are on the bulletin board at school.

For the rest of September we’ll work on a “Dot Stitchery” project which combines abstract painting on a square of foam core, and adding a circular pattern with yarn stitching.

If you would like to help out in your child’s art class, there is a SIGN UP SHEET on the bulletin board to the left of the office. Thank you so much!