It’s the first full week of school!  Here’s what the fifth graders are up to:

Reading: We’re kicking off the school year by learning about folktales.  We will use folktales to learn about and analyze story elements like plot, characters, setting, and conflict.  Reading lots of shorter stories gives us opportunity to compare these elements and talk about the different ways stories are impacted by them.  Our second focus will be on culture.  We will read stories from all over the world and discuss how we can learn about other cultures through literature.

Writing/Language: We are laying the groundwork on which we will rely while learning about writing this year.  This week, students reviewed the necessary components of complete sentences and will analyze the differences between topic, format, and purpose of a piece.  We will review the steps of the writing process and begin learning about prewriting strategies as we begin our first unit: opinion writing!

Word Study: Students will learn about our spelling routines this week.

Social Studies: First things first, we will talk about what history is, how we know about it, and why we learn it.    We will start our learning about the past on Friday, when we will talk about prehistory and discuss what is known about prehistoric peoples.

Science: Yesterday, students learned about the scientific process and how scientists continually test, retest, and change theories based on new information.  To illustrate the point, we learned about how scientists developed different theories to explain why the dinosaurs died out.

Math: We began our first unit of the year -number sense with whole numbers.  This week, students will review how to write numbers in standard, word, and expanded form.  We also learned about exponents and powers of 10!