It’s a busy week leading up to the winter break! The field trip to the Springfield Solar Farm was very informative and only a little cold. Tomorrow, fifth graders will get to enjoy watching the upper school Film Fest and celebrate the end of the 2025 year with a winter party! Hope everyone has a safe and fulfilling few weeks, and see you all in 2026! Here’s what the fifth grade classroom looked like this week:
Reading: Students are half way through their novels. This week, they were asked to reflect on what their novels can teach them about empathy and compassion. We will review this question when we reach the end of the novels too.
Writing: Students completed their brainstorms and outlines for their expository essays. We’ll be drafting those when we return from break.
Language Study: Students learned about prepositions and conjunctions this week. These lessons round out our part-of-speech learning. When we return in 2026, we will be moving on to complex/compound sentences and more advanced punctuation topics.
Social Studies: This week, we took a step back to discuss why peoples on the American continents were separated (with a few special exceptions) from peoples in the Europe/Asia/Africa continents from the Ice Age through the 1400s C.E.. The fifth graders were very thoughtful about what makes ocean travel and exploration difficult.
Science; In addition to the field trip, students conducted an experiment using batteries and a light bulb to see which kinds of materials electricity will flow through.
Math: We wrapped up our 7th unit of the year on converting measurements and finding the area of rectangles and triangles. We will have a review week when we return, then dive into 3-dimentional shapes.