Sorry for not posting last week. I’ve been away in Shanghai for the past 5 days for a math workshop. I’m so excited to try out some new things with 5B, which I already did today! We’re going to continue the lesson tomorrow, which is great, because that’s when Learning Comes Alive is. Please come Thursday, 25 January from 11:20 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. to the 5B classroom. We’re going to be building our conceptual understanding of how dividing numbers and fractions are related.
This lesson is the start of our new unit on multiplying and dividing fractions and decimal fractions. Please read over the Unit 5 Newsletter to get vocabulary and see how the students will be solving problems with models. Again, I ask that you don’t teach your child “shortcuts” to multiplying and dividing fractions until the conceptual understanding is solid.
Tomorrow is also our SIS Spirit Day. The kids should wear their SIS clothes. (see poster below)
Thursday, 1 February is Conferences. There is no school for students. However, 5th grade students are expected to be at their classroom conference since they will be leading the discussion on how they are doing with their goals. (They will not be a part of any specials conferences.) The sign-up link for conferences for grade 5 students will be sent tomorrow.
In reading and writing, we’re continuing to work on reading persuasive texts to find evidence that supports reasons for a given claim. We held practice debates in reading today. We realized we need to work on really being clear as to what one reason is and supporting that one reason with several strong pieces of evidence from the text.
Below are some pictures from our publishing party last week and our science experiments. We’ve been growing wheat to see how plants get their energy. We will then connect this to food webs as we discuss how the energy from plants gets transferred to the other organisms in the ecosystem.