Week of January 14

We made it through the first week of the new year! Are you used to writing 2008 yet?

Our field trip to the Naper Settlement was truly enlightening. A special thank you to Matt’s mom for chaperoning.

During the upcoming week, we will be taking part in GeoSpace – an in-school field trip that will take place on Wednesday morning.
On Friday, we will be presenting a Reader’s Theater performance for the other 5th grade classes. We are diligently practicing our drama skills!

Reading – We will be reading Katie’s Trunk in our reading series. A vocabulary quiz will be on Wednesday and a comprehension quiz will be on Thursday.

Science – After learning about air pressure last week, we will be discussing temperature as a follow up.

Language – We are studying punctuation. We learned just how important commas are and even made our own cartoons showing what a difference a comma can make in a sentence! For the upcoming week, we will be using apostrophes, abbreviations and quotations.

Social Studies - We experienced some of the frustration of the colonists who were taxed unfairly before the Revolutionary War during our King of M&M simulation. This upcoming week, we will learn about the Boston Masacre in lesson 2 of chapter 8.

Spelling – All students were sent home with the rules and explanations of the Spelling Bee. In addition to our regular routine of pretesting lesson 15 on Monday and post-testing on Friday, our class will have two spelling tests on the words in the Spelling Bee to narrow the competition down to only 2 students from each class.

My Math group - My students are doing an OUTSTANDING job on measuring and classifying angles, identifying polygons and familiarizing themselves with our geometry terms. On Friday, there will be a checkpoint quiz covering Chapter 5, lessons 1-7. I have included two great websites in my link list that provide practice working with angles and polygons.

On Friday, we will be wearing our PV school spirit wear.

There is no school on Monday, January 21st.

Our indoor recess game supply is very limited. If you have a game at home that still has all the necessary parts and you are finding it is just taking up closet space, please consider donating it to our class. The students would be very appreciative! Decks of playing cards are also hot commodities!

I haven’t mentioned Spike, our bearded dragon in a while…S/he is doing well! I think we are about a month or two away from finding out if Spike is a boy or girl. S/he has shed several times and is going to need a larger home soon. I am going to test out my carpentry skills (with a lot of help from my dad, unbeknownst to him) and attempt to build him/her a larger cage. If this doesn’t work out, maybe one of you has the inside scoop on where I might be able to find a somewhat inexpensive cage. I was looking over break and found several cages that would be perfect, but they also cost around $180.00. Yikes Spike – you’re going to have to start earning your keep around here!

Have a great week!

Ms. Stetka