4th/5th Week 5

Language Arts

The highlight of this week, in Literacy, was the kick off of our much anticipated book club! Our students never cease to amaze me! After we discussed the objectives/purpose for this project and created a reading calendar collaboratively, everybody jumped right into their reading. Students took home two packets: one of them states the expectations and has the daily reading log students are expected to fill in after their daily reading of fifteen pages in class. If students are not able to finish reading their fifteen pages in class, they need to finish reading and logging in at home. The other packet is the portfolio students are required to submit at the end of the book club on October 23rd. Please make sure you discuss the guidelines with your child. If you have any questions, please contact me. I encourage parents to read the book and be a part our our reading experience! Who knows, maybe we could have parents join in during our discussions! One of our students, Camdyn Segall, says: -Esta semana fue una semana espectacular! Empezamos el proyecto de otono: El club de lectura. Este es un club de nuestra clase. Nuestro libro es: Con carino, Amalia, escrito por Alma Flor Ada y Gabriel M Zubizarreta. Nosotros leemos 15 paginas en la escuela cada dia-.

Congratulations to all our students this week for doing such an amazing job during their Literacy assessments! I will be grading the assessments and giving individual feedback next week! We will also display their final published writing pieces (third person point of view) on the hallway for everyone to read.

Literacy Activity (English)

This week we created story maps. We were each given a book. Our job was to draw the protagonist, antagonist, conflict, resolution, beginning, middle and end of the story. We had lots of fun explaining these funny books this week! – By: Ava and Riley

Math

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! On Friday at Spanish with Sarah, we did a Rolling dice rounding game. We we played was we rolled a dice 6-7 times for a number. We rounded to the nearest hundred, ten-thousand and million. It was awesome! – By: Madi and Santiago

On Friday for math we did a rounding activity called the Rolling dice rounding game. We played with our partners and we each got a sheet of paper and dice. We played by rolling the dice 6-7 times for each number. Each number is a value in a hundred thousand or million number. Next, we rounded the number to the nearest hundred, ten thousands and millions. We had fun playing the game. Have a great weekend! – Bailey and Alana

Social Studies

This week our class made a codex of telling the journey of the way to school. We had to do four symbols (or hieroglyphs) of things we see on the way to school The next day we shared our codex with the class. – By: Alli and Carsen

This week we finished up our ancient civilization study. We learned about eh ancient Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas. We learned about their culture, their past, their leaders, inventions, religions, and much more. We made graphs to show all these things, and will put them to work for next week’s ancient civilization research project. More information will be sent home next week. We can’t wait to start with this fun and interesting project! We also had our poetry reciting this Friday. Big shout out to all the kids who took the time to memorize and recite the poem “Flowers are our only garments” from an ancient Aztec civilization. We will be sending home poems for students to memorize and recite. Make sure to ask your kids about the poems and civilizations. Have a great week! – Camdyn and Connor

This week we got into depth about the Inca civilization. The Incas built a fortress called the Machu Piccu that was between to peaks of the Andes Mountains in Peru. They believed that their emperor was the son of Inti, the sun god. They invented the litter, a chair they could carry on their shoulders. Their empire was from 1438 to 1532. They were conquered by Francisco Pizarro and his troop of men. Ask your children what it was like for the emperor to come to your village! Have a great weekend! – Grace and Azalea

Science

En ciencias, aprendimos mas sobre soluciones y mezclas. Tenemos un nuevo libro de ciencias titulado La mezcla de la materia. Los estudiantes deben estar leyendo este libro este fin de semana y encontrando las vocales y acentos que faltan. (Students should read this book this weekend and find the missing vowels and accents. An extra challenge!) Tambien hicimos un experimento para separar una mezcla de sal y agua. Nuestras predicciones fueron que para separar el agua, era necesario colocar los platillos al sol o a una temperatura alta para que el agua se evaporara. Pudimos comprobar que nuestras predicciones eran correctas. Luego, aplicando la habilidad de comparar y contrastar, observamos las caracteristicas de la sal antes y despues de la evaporacion. Entonces lo que descubrimos fue muy intersante! – Camdyn y maestra Paola.

Art

The 4th and 5th graders still needed to put some finishing touches on their Fence Portraits this week in art. They really look great! Several students also had time to paint a small watercolor of fall leaves. Next week we’ll do some more watercolor painting, and then start on an Aztec mask.

Music

This week’s theme was water in the desert. We started with Washington’s state folk song, “Roll on, Columbia,” by Woody Guthrie, talked about the dams and the birth of large-scale irrigation as a response to the Depression. Then we learned an Israeli folk song and dance”Mayim,” celebrating the finding of water in the desert.

Character Education

We wrapped up our theme of Kindness this week. We discussed how we began the year with this character trait since it is one of the most important ones to carry us through the rest of the year. The students did a fabulous job illustrating acts of kindness on their Kindness Counts posters. Hopefully everyone was able to check out their artwork Wednesday afternoon!