As we’re heading into the second full week of school, and the routines are becoming more…well…routine, we’ll be getting into some bigger projects, delving deeper into material, and completing end of unit assessments. Fifth grade will be busy this week!
Reading: Continuing on with our folktales unit, we will be reading stories from Caribbean, Jewish, African, Chinese, and Native American cultures (among others!). We will be using these stories to compare different types of literary conflict and common types of folktale characters.
Writing: We are learning about and practicing prewriting strategies this week. Prewriting strategies are meant to help develop the ideas and organization used in a piece of writing. With these two elements of writing set for a piece, drafting becomes a much easier process.
Word Study: This is a spelling week! All students will get a second list of homophones this week. There will be a spelling test on Friday.
Social Studies: We will be learning about prehistoric human beings this week. To do so, we will start with group learning about the definitions of prehistory, Stone Age, and Ice Age. Then, students will create questions about life during this time and conduct research to answer to those questions.
Science: Fifth graders have begun their first group project of the year. They will be creating a scaled diagram of the internal layers of the Earth.
Math: Building upon last week’s learning about powers of 10 (10 and 100 and 1,000), students will learn about multiplying and dividing big whole numbers by powers of 10 and multiples of powers of 10 (ex: 60 and 300 and 5000). On Friday, students will be given a study guide and we will discuss what studying is and review common studying methods and expectations. This study guide will be kept in the orange folder in students’ backpacks over the weekend in case families want to review at home (please make sure it comes back to school every day so we can continue to review in class!). The assessment on this first unit in math will take place next week.