Welcome Back! (Be sure to read entire post)

We hit the ground running coming back from the winter break with fully charged batteries!  Many exciting things happened this week in J15 and at Jefferson.  We began our new math unit on volume.  Students will be finding the volume for irregular shaped rectangular prisms.  Students began reading and discussing their new books for their new lit circles.  We reviewed expectations for summaries, questioner, and language enricher.  Students should be sure to use transition words in their summary, ask at least 2 talk worthy questions for questioner, and find two pieces of figurative language for language enricher.  In science, we began our new unit on simple machines and in history we began looking at the 13 original colonies.

Thursday was an exciting day for J15 as Officer Mucciarone came to begin the D.A.R.E. program with our 5th grade classes.  Students introduced themselves and Officer Mucciarone gave us some information about himself and the program.

Before the break, students took our topic 7 test.  Results on this test on dividing decimals were nowhere near where we want them.  Our class missed two important WIN blocks due to the snowstorms and also missed my presence because of a workshop for 'Responsive Classroom' training.  I believe these missed days had a significant impact on our performance on this test.  As such, we will be reviewing this topic extensively in class during the next couple weeks.  (I did not send out individual emails of test results because they were low across the board.)

On a better note, students have been excelling during our new unit on volume!  Please watch the video below to see an example of the types of problems students have been working on.

Weekly Update 1/25-1/29 & Important Math Updates

Students continued working in their lit circles for their first book selection.  We also began discussing theme and students began to think about possible themes for their lit circle books.  In science, we have been studying atoms, molecules, compounds, states of matter, and changes in states of matter.  On Wednesday, the Franklin Fire Department came for an assembly on fire safety and general safety around the home.  Quite a few from J15 went to the stage to give a helping hand!  Finally, on Friday we began painting our finger puppets with the help of our artist in residence.

Our next math topic is dividing decimals.  The crux of the topic has students dividing decimal numbers and decimal numbers.  Please watch the video below as a refresher.

Rowan!

Cara!

Grace!