Bridges: Callie's Cake Pops Doubling and Halving, and December Number Corner

This December Number Corner works on identifying quadrilaterals, and naming their features.

 We are also working on measurement using our height and foot length. We have built line plots and scatter plots using the data.

In Bridges we have been working on multiplication strategies including ratio tables, array models, and doubling and halving. 

Here are some examples of how our discussions of strategy play out on paper. 

MAP math this week!!

Thursday afternoon we will be doing the Math Measures of Academic Progress assessment.

Social Studies: The New England, Middle and Southern Colonies

In Chapter 7 of Social Studies Alive we studied the three colonial regions, New England, Middle and Southern Colonies. Students worked on a Problem Solving Group work activity, students created a billboard for one of six British colonies and then tried to persuade other students to settle in their colony with a commercial.
     They all worked hard on coming up with slogans, catch phrases, billboards and presentations. Here are pictures of their finished billboards. 

Writing: Non-fiction

Non-Fiction Writing

Our writing goal this quarter is to write Non-Fiction pieces. Our "I Can" statements include: I can write informative/explanatory tests to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly. 
We will get to that goal by working on how to organize our writing, so our first lessons were on how to write complete and organized paragraphs. We learned about the three parts to a paragraph, the topic sentences, the detail sentences, and the concluding sentence. The following shows the process we went through to plan and draft our non-fiction writing.  Students will be using these rough drafts to produce a picture book page about a chosen animal, that will all be combined to make a class book on animals. Pages will include not just their paragraphs but could also have illustrations, diagrams, maps, charts/graphs, glossary, titles/subtitles etc, which are often found within non-fiction text. 

Bridges: Division using Place Value

Students have been working this week on division of whole numbers using place value models, and base ten grid paper. This is a very new and complicated strategy, but we feel like after a few days students really started getting it.  Here are some examples from the text, as well as some student work. Ask your child to explain how they used the base ten models.

Wright Middle School Information and VISIT

Wright Middle School Administration and students will visit our 5th graders on January 10th, but the lottery for enrollment into Wright begins before that (see timeline below). 

Wright Lottery Application Timeline:

• December 3th - Lottery opens 8:00am. 
• January 15th - Open House at Wright.
• January 31st - Lottery closes 4:00pm. 
• February 18th - Lottery results mailed to families this week. All letters will be mailed no later than Feb 22. 
• February 28th - Accept or decline Confirmation due to schools from families.

Bridges: Fractions and Decimals

In Bridges we have been working on Fraction and Decimal equivalencies. We have also been thinking about decimals on a number line and rounding decimal numbers to the nearest whole number, tenth and hundredth.

Students are encouraged to think about fractions as division problems in order to help them translate fractions into decimals. For example 1 divided by 8 = 0.125. so 1/8=0.125.

Here are some games to continue practicing ordering and rounding decimals:
Town Creator - Rounding
Decimal Sharks - Rounding
Decimal Art - Ordering
Decimal Jeopardy - All Topics