The spring busy season is upon us.  This time last year, we were packing and preparing for the move to our new building, and I felt that we could never be busier.  I was wrong.  This group of students is so motivated and driven, that they have taken on several projects, and are succeeding at all of them.

The Gala experience was a great success.  Thank you to everyone who contributed to the party.  The kindergarteners had a good time, and the fifth graders were exceptional!

Despite competing with sixth grade in the LAD Fair writing competition, several members of the class earned ribbons.  Three members of our Destination Imagination team will be competing in state championships this weekend, while two of our team members are away competing in a dance competition.  Eight of our class members qualified for regional math competition, with Grayson progressing on to state competition in a couple of weeks. The Sons of the American Revolution will be here soon to hand out awards for their poster contest, including a special award to Sydney, who won the state level competition with her poster on Nathanael Greene.  Evelyn took second place at the Springfield Bar Association Law Day contest with her very creative poster on “Free Speech, Free Press, Free Country.”  It is a joy to watch them strive and succeed!

This week, we have been taking  the ERB, and will  finish testing today.  Many of our superheroes are finished, and are ready to take on the challenges that will be thrown at them next week. This is always a fun activity, and I suspect that their solutions to the challenges will be both creative and humorous.  Also next week, we will begin work on our display boards for Science Fair.  If you have any questions, or wish for me to print out any photographs that were taken during the experiments, please be sure to contact me.

Dates to remember are:

May 1 – Book Club

May 2 – Third Trimester Celebration

May 7 – Grandparents Day and the Spring Concert

The fifth grade class returned from Spring Break raring to go.  We have begun the process of changing our geometric designs and tessellations into fabric lap quilts to be given to charities.  I hope for these to be finished by our third trimester celebration.  That date and time will be secured soon.

The class has been quite busy the past few days preparing for LAD Fair.  It will be held at Willard High School on April 27, 2019.  Although there will be no spelling bee this year, I still encourage you to attend and look at some of the wonderful writing and art projects that area students have created.

In Social Studies, we have begun studying the ancient civilizations of Meso and South America.  As we explore these civilizations, we are seeking to answer the bigger questions of what constitutes a culture, and what happens when cultures collide?

Math Madness has begun in fifth grade, as we are using the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to practice math and geography skills.  We’ll be calculating distances and travel time between venues, collecting data related to scores, and practicing representing the data in different forms of graphs and charts.  While we’re at it, we’ll learn something about the schools’ academic programs, as well!  Students are not required to watch any of the games, but it will add to the fun if they do.

I hope everyone stays safe and warm today.

If you have your copy of What Elephants Know, you may continue to work on your photo album of flora and fauna that is featured in the book.  If you don’t have your copy of the book, do some research into the flora and fauna of Nepal and add it to your photo album.  I can guarantee that almost everything you find will be mentioned in the book at some point!

Have some fun with data collection and graphing today.  Check out weather.com, wunderground.com or KY3 Weather.  Create a graph of our temperature over the past several days, or compare our temperature or precipitation with some other places.  Choose the best kind of graph to most clearly show the information.

Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see you Tuesday!

The fifth and sixth grade book study is off to a great start!  We are reading What Elephants Know by Eric Dinerstein. The students are keeping up with the  reading schedule, and have had some very insightful discussions.  We meet twice a week, once for a book discussion and once for an activity.  So far, the students have researched Nepal, the setting of the story, and created a poster of their findings.  We have just begun story maps, with each group deciding upon a unique way to create their map.  Once finished, each group will have an artistic representation of the story.

In science and math, we are preparing for our annual Science Fair.  In math, we have been reviewing how to collect, interpret and represent data.  In science, we have been practicing using the scientific process.  Each student has received a Science Fair schedule detailing when each step of the process is due.  By now, they should have their research question, background research, hypothesis, materials, and procedure completed.  By next week, experimentation should have begun.  As most of this will be completed at home, please let me know if your child is struggling with any part of the process, and I will do my best to help.

See you Monday!

I hope everyone is staying warm and cozy on this frigid morning.  Please go to the Snow Day Brain Work tab for activities that you may do.  This week’s spelling words are Scripps Spelling Bee list #1.

Because there was a problem accessing the page, I’ve added the link:

Snow Day Brain Work

Check out weather.com to see what is happening in the rest of the country.  We’ll be using some weather data to practice graphing and we’ll also discuss the polar vortex when we return to school.

See you soon!