Over the
past few weeks everyone completed the district reading assessment, the Benchmark Assessment System 2. There are three parts to this
assessment. The first one involves oral
reading. This section assesses accuracy,
self-correction and fluency. Part two
measures reading comprehension. The final
part is on writing about reading. I will be sharing the results of this
assessment at the November Parent/Teacher conferences.
We continue
our work on writing narratives. This
past week we practiced oral narratives, spent time on writing inspirations and continued
to learn about a variety of narrative leads.
Next week, our focus will be on elaboration.
Students have
finished creating SMART goals in all academic areas. Transferable Skill 6 expects students to set
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely goals. They are now creating list poems of their
goals.
On Thursday
this week students in Chorus and 6th grade Band traveled to U32 for
the day to participate in a day of music.
From the conversations when they returned, everyone clearly had a great
day!
5th Grade News
Our unit on
the Vermont state butterfly, the monarch, is coming to the end. We tagged our last butterfly a little over a
week ago. On Tuesday afternoon, we put
finishing touches on our Book Creator projects and Green Screen projects.
Last night
several fifth graders represented our class at the school board meeting. They shared much of our learning, including
poetry/watercolors, our technology projects, samples of our journals and
scientific sketching and photos of us tagging/releasing our butterflies. They did an amazing job and I was so proud of
them. Everyone has done a tremendous job
in this unit and I think the board members were impressed with their learning. Our
work will be on display during the Open House next Wednesday.
In math
class we continue our work with volume of a rectangular prism. Volume is the amount of space inside a solid
figure. Earlier in the unit students learned to find the volume of a solid
figure by filling it with unit cubes. We
then learned another way to find volume.
We counted the cubes in the base layer and then added. For example, if
there were 6 unit cubes in the base, and three layers you could add 6 + 6 + 6
to get the volume. Next, we looked at
multiplication to find volume. We are
now creating 3-d robots from cardboard rectangular prisms and then calculating
each body part’s volume. Hopefully,
these will be finished by Open House.
Have a
wonderful weekend!
