It’s an eventful week!  Grandfriends’ Day, despite being interrupted by some pretty severe weather, was a success.  The fifth graders had the opportunity to create some tessellation art, visit the bookfair, and show their grandfriends some of their work from this year.

Today, fifth graders got to visit with a librarian from Library Center, who spoke with them about summer reading programs.  The class was also visited by Mrs. Becky, who came to speak with us about the transition to middle school.  She discussed schedules, the different classes that students will be taking, how to sign up for electives, and how the grading system works.  She answered a ton of questions!  Mrs. Becky is our first of many middle-school-specialists who will be visiting over the next few weeks to discuss the transition to next year. We call this our “Middle School Skills Speaker Series.”

Students are excited for tomorrow as well, when they will have a special afternoon with administration (see email for more details).

Here’s the plan for the classroom this week:

Reading: Groups are reaching the ends of their novels this week.  The remaining groups will finish novels next week.

Science: Students are finishing up their posters on cells. They are also finishing their research for their Zoo Projects.  Next week, students will be creating proposals for adding an exhibit to the Dickerson Park Zoo.

Social Studies: The students voted on who was the most influential European explorer of the Americas.  We moved on to learn about Spanish and French colonization of the Americas.

Math: We learned about positive and negative numbers this week.  Students are also learning about coordinate planes and how to plot points on a 4-quadrant coordinate plane.