Hello and Happy Valentine’s Day 🙂 It’s been an exciting week in the classroom, filled with lots of fun and (good) challenges. Before we get into it, let’s go over important dates:
February 16th – No school, President’s Day
February 18th – Ash Wednesday. 10am Mass
February 20th – Stations of the Cross, 2:30pm. Stations of the Cross will happen every Friday at 2:30pm, and we will host it in March. Stay tuned for the date!
March 7th – Spring Auction! 6:30-10:30pm in the Parish Center.
What have our big brains been soaking in lately? Let’s get into it!
ELA – The final draft of the Opinion Pieces are due on Wednesday, February 18th. We have been working on these essays bit by bit so we can improve our writing processes. I introduced the students to the thesaurus (I have physical copies in my room, and I sent all of the students a link to one as well). We have also improved our grasp of concrete and abstract nouns. Our current focus is irregular past-tense verbs (did, went, brought — NOT brang) and we will have an assessment next week. In Phonics, we are studying my personal favorite language arts topic, prefixes and suffixes!
Science – This past week, we started creating our physical food web displays. The students chose an ecosystem and are mapping out the producers, consumers, and decomposers. They will then show the relationships among all organisms in the food web, which will show how everything is connected!
Religion – We are about to wrap up our unit on the Eucharist. Our next group of Sacraments will be the Sacraments of Healing! As fifth graders, the students will also manage one of the Stations of the Cross in March. This is a wonderful opportunity for everyone to participate and reflect on Jesus’ sacrifice for us. I will send out a reminder for you to join us!
Math – I am so proud of the hard work that the students have put into fractions; finding denominators and equivalent fractions is so small feat, especially in word problems. They just finished a test and I will return the test next week. Students can make corrections on every test I offer. Please check your child’s grades on PowerSchool and make sure that they bring tests home to improve grades, it is one of the simplest ways to improve marks. Next unit will be about adding and subtracting mixed numbers!
Reading – Our latest novel, Number the Stars, concluded with a character analysis project. Students were broken up into groups and had to find direct quotes, assess if the character changed in the book and how their character connects to the themes of friendship and bravery. I can’t wait to display these in the hallway! Our next novel will be Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince).
That’s all from me, folks! If you want to see what’s going on in Social Studies, head on over to Miss Pretzie’s page.