Revising our Writing

We have been hard at work revising our Native American journal entry! We started by thinking about good beginnings and strong endings. We have also worked on:

•  Word choice -- Said is Dead!
•  Sensory details -- we read a beautiful book called Bread Song which does an incredible job of weaving in sensory details
• Adding dialogue
• Figurative language -- mostly similes and metaphors with a little bit of personification 

As we come to the end of our revision work there are a few ideas we are working to keep in mind:

Here are a few examples of revisions that have been made to student work:

This author has used our revising booklet's space to add to both the beginnin

g and ending on this page.

Here's an example of three new beginnings. We discussed that the third 

beginning was almost always our most successful. 

Great dialogue! Wonderful details!

WOW! What great dialogue!

This author added to the end of their original "paragraph"

What amazing detail! Just the kind 5th graders just love to read!

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

For the last two weeks we have been doing a shared read of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Shared reading is where every child has the same opportunity to read a grade level text, regardless of their reading level. This is because the teacher reads the text, but each child has a copy in front of them to follow along. Our focus while reading Sadako has been on writing responses to reading in our reading journals.  In our response journals we ask students to use a a T-Chart to think about:

• What are the ideas that are in my head
• What part of the text made me think this or supports my thinking (this is that quoting accurately part we are working on!)

Our T-Charts look like this:

We have learned two strategies for writing about our reading: character analysis and questioning. We are using an interactive notebook feature to help us organize our new learning about a variety of strategies. We use the notebook organizer to give us ideas about ways we can think about text, and to help guide our journal writing by providing us with a few sentence starters aligned to each strategy. Here are some notebook examples:

As a celebration of our completion of the book, we learned how to make paper cranes! Can we make it to 1,000???

Week in Review

Math: Review of Area and Perimeter. It is important that we take time to make sure everyone can find the area and perimeter of rectangles because we will be moving into volume next week!

Area and Perimeter Review Games:
Zoo Designer

Square Off

Shape Surveyor

Reading: Continued work on quoting accurately to support our answers to questions. We used the text "Vikings and European Explorers: Shipbuilding and Warfare". All students were tested using Lexia. Lexia will be used for all students who do not test out of the 5th grade level. Most students will complete about 40 minutes a week of Lexia (10 min/day or 20 min/2 x a week). 

Writing: We are in the super fun stage of revision on our Native American journal entries! This week we worked on new beginnings and endings, and adding dialogue to our entries. 

Social Studies: We are learning about European Explorers. We worked in partners to read and take notes about one explorer, then combined with another group who studied the same explorer to compare notes. As a group, students completed an explorer ship with information about the explorer they studied and shared out with the group. We talked about the idea of the "New World"; how it wasn't really a new world because people were already living here, and how the European explorers we studied may not have actually been the explorers to land in North and South America. 

**Keep practicing those U.S. states! 

Science: In science we are learning about variables. We are using a swinger experiment to help us practice using a standard for our experiment and to help us test changing the variable in an experiment. 

Order of Operations

This week we are working on the Order of Operations in math!

At the beginning of the week we spent time looking at and building models that represent equations. We got do a little painting to go along with this work!

As a class we created this interactive notebook page to help guide our work. We will be solving a variety of problems at different levels of challenge to practice the order of operations, as well as learning a couple of fun games to reinforce our learning.

Games to practice your order of operations skills:
Order of Ops Heist
Order of Operations Rescue
Order of Operations Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

Historical Journal Writing

This year in writing the 5th graders will extend their skills in narrative writing by writing journals from the perspective of different groups of people throughout history. We are beginning this work this week by writing from the perspective of one of the groups of Native Americans we studied in chapter 3. As we begin this work we are using the information we have from the text to complete this journal writing plan.

After completing the plan, we will write a journal entry from the perspective of that group or tribe. This journal entry will become the basis of our revision work over the next few weeks.  

Native American Homes STEM Project

In chapter 3 of Social Studies Alive we learned about many Native American tribes in America. Our essential question was: How and why did American Indian cultural regions differ? 
In groups students read and analyzed text and historical artifacts from different American Indian groups and where they lived, and how the tribes used the resources available to survive. We then compared and contrasted life in the various regions.

We then did a great project where we tried building different kinds of Native American homes using a variety of objects from nature, as well as paper, string, toothpicks, marshmallows, boxes, etc.  We made a mess but we had a blast! Some groups were more successful than others, but I believe everyone had fun and learned a lot about working in a group and persevering through something difficult. Here are some great shots of their hard work!