A New School Year!!

Welcome to 5th Grade.  I have a fun, new year planned for a new, great class.  I am so excited to have all new smiling faces.  It is so fun to meet new students and their parents.  We have done a lot of work and had a  lot of laughs so far.  In spite of too much talking, I think this class is going to be great, but a little goofy at times.

We are almost finished with our 2nd week of school and it seems to be flying by.  We have a large class this year so we all have to work together to be a caring family class.  We have a lot of new teachers at Park Lane this year and new programs to use.  It should be an exciting year.

We have a new math program called Envision.  It uses online materials as well as books and handouts.  We are still getting used to it, but I think it will work out really well.  The students seem to be enjoying it.

I need to get back into the blogging mode so I can keep everyone informed of what is happening in our class.  Here are a few things you will want to make note of for your September Calendar.

6th - No School (Labor Day)
9th - Pictures Day
13th - No School (District Furlough Day)
14th - 16th - IOWA Testing
14th - President Obama address to the students of the Nation
15th - CBM Testing (Reading)
16th, 21st, & 22nd - Fitness Testing - Mile Run (I am not sure which day is for us)

Language Arts
We are reading a novel The Word Eater.  The students are doing activities every day that involves the book besides reading it.  The vocabulary words are from the novel.  Tests are on Fridays.
We are finishing the 2nd week of Spelling.  There is homework on Wednesday nights, a Skill & Proof Test on Thursdays, and the Word Test on Fridays.
We have been doing a lot of writing.  This has included Autobio Poems, Journal Writing, and they are currently writing a story about the beginning a school year.
For Literature we are reading a book call No Talking by Andrew Clements.  The students have really enjoyed it and have been excited about experimenting with some of the antics of the 5th graders in the book for themselves.

Technology
By following the guidelines of Canyons School District, we are teaching keyboarding for 20 minutes a day for 20 consecutive days.  We have also using Word to format and type documents.

Math
We are currently working on Numbers & Operations in Base Ten, by understanding Place Value.  We are ordering and comparing numbers and will soon be using decimals.  We will then move into rounding whole numbers and decimals, finally moving into adding and subtracting decimals.

Social Studies
We are studying about our heritage, our ancestors, and our names.  Next we will review geography skills  using maps to locate hemispheres, continents, and oceans, then the borders of the U.S., Canada, & Mexico.  We will discuss the first inhabitants of the US.

Science
We just started out 1st rotation of science.  We are learning about how slow processes like weathering,  erosion, and uplift change the Earth's surface and how volcanoes, earthquakes, and landslides very quickly affect the Earth's surface.