Week 29

TWIG5: THIS WEEK IN GRADE 5...

WEEK OF mar.18th TO mar.22nd

Welcome to week 29 of learning, exploring & having fun!!! 
We hope you all enjoyed our international festival over the weekend! It was great to see so many countries represented. We would also like to thank parents for attending parent-teacher conferences last week. It is always a pleasure to meet with you to discuss your children's progress and development!

REMINDERS

• Puberty Talks: The first session will take place on Mar. 18; the second on Mar. 25th. Please refer to our previous posts for more detailed information about topics and videos. 
• Field Trip: We have a science filed trip coming up, please refer to emails for more details. Please remember that students should be dressed in comfortable clothes and be ready for spring weather (cool or hot). They need to wear good walking shoes and bring a packed lunch, snack and plenty of water. A hat for sun protection is always a good idea! Thanks to all of the parents who have volunteered as chaperones!!
• Founder's Day: March 20th at 2:30 on the ES lawn- parents are welcome to attend! If you would like to write a thank you note to CAC as part of our display, you can send it to school with your child and your child's teacher will make sure it is included. Notes need to be collected by March 19th. 
• ASA's will begin this week. Personalized schedules have been shared with parents via email last week.  Please remind your child of their schedules. 
• Book Fair Parade: The book fair parade will take place on April 10th- the theme will be 'Graphic Novels'. More details to follow in the upcoming weeks. 

CURRICULUM CORNER

LANGUAGE ARTS

We are all pretty excited about our new integrated reading and writing unit. In reading workshop: Argument and Advocacy and in writing workshop: The Research-Based Argument Essay.  
With a critical eye, students will be considering perspective & craft while evaluating arguments. We will be looking closely for patterns and connections across a variety of issues. The issues that will be presented and researched will be provocative and debatable. This unit will promote active, critical thinkers who will read to be informed and will resist the urge to form opinions until they seek to understand both sides of an issue.  In Grade 5, students will learn to include counter arguments in their essays and aim to weaken the opposition's argument.  

We have begun with reading several essays on the topic of Zoos. Students rated the articles on their APL (argumentative power level) to spark an interesting discussion about what makes a good argument. From there, students will analyze ads and articles discovering the difference between a persuasive text and an argumentative text. Students will begin work in small research groups this week to investigate the different sides of a relevant issue. Some of our research questions are: 

-Should people be more focused on underwater exploration or outer space exploration?
-Are extreme sports worth the risk?
-Should we ban bottled water?

Students will read to identify the claim being made and the reasons that support it. Using what we are learning in our reading groups, students will also begin to think about the issues that they are passionate about and will do some writing on a variety of these issues. 

In order to keep up the expected volume of reading, students are encouraged to read fiction books at home. It will be very important that students keep track of their reading in their reading log and to JOT as they read. 

MATH

Our final assessment was given last week and this week students will reflect on how they did asking themselves: 1. What can I do well? 2. What do I need to work on? As always, teachers will review the assessment, answering any questions students have as we work through the problems. On Thursday, we gave all students the pre-assessment for module 5. Using this information, we aim to differentiate the learning so that all students are challenged at the level that they need. We will engage the students with some math stations and a hyperdoc before beginning our new unit. Our new unit is named Addition & Multiplication with Volume and Area. Please see below an overview: 

In this module, students work with two- and three-dimensional figures. Volume is introduced to students through concrete exploration of cubic units and culminates with the development of the volume formula for right rectangular prisms. The second half of the module turns to extending students’ understanding of two-dimensional figures. Students combine prior knowledge of area with newly acquired knowledge of fraction multiplication to determine the area of rectangular figures with fractional side lengths. They then engage in hands-on construction of two-dimensional shapes, developing a foundation for classifying the shapes by reasoning about their attributes. This module fills a gap between Grade 4’s work with two-dimensional figures and Grade 6’s work with volume and area.

SCIENCE

We have been very busy scientists as our exploration into the forces affecting land continues. Using stream tables, lab partners have been looking closely to what happens to the surface of the Earth when water flows over it (erosion) as well as looking at what happens to the Earth particles when they are washed away (deposition). Our young scientists are recording their experiments and uploading videos and photos to their blogs which will be shared with parents during the student-led conferences. Students had fun while taking on the role of aquatic engineers; trying to figure out ways to manipulate the flow of water. 

During our next set of experiments, our eager scientists will continue to explore erosion and how these processes affect landforms. We will focus on wind erosion as students create a wind tunnel and use a wind bazooka to compare the different effects wind can have on landforms. We will continue to add to our blog to record all of our learning. 

Circle Solutions

One of the themes for this week is stress and strategies that students can use to deal with stresses that come up. Perseverance is another theme that will be highlighted in our circles throughout this month.

Pictures of our drama field trip: PHOTOS

Your partners in education,

LeeAnn Kasal lkasal@cacegypt.org

Caitlin Johnson cjohnson@cacegypt.org

Bonnie Greene barmstronggreene@cacegypt.org

Jonathan O'Sullivan josullivan@cacegypt.org