September 9-13

     Well, we made it through the first full week in awhile!  We have lots of things happening here in the fifth grade!  The students projects are in full swing with first round presentations happening this coming Thursday.  We are excited to see how all of these wonderful ideas are going to be presented.  We have had a few bumps in the road which is to be expected when working with groups.  The learners all seem to be working out their issues and in a few cases we have stepped in to help resolve them.  This is a new way to learn for some students and we all have to work together to make is a positive experience so if you hear of any issues at home please shoot us an email and we will try and resolve them. 
     We went to visit the sixth grade Innovation Academy on Friday and got to do a walk through and look at some of their first projects.  This gave the students some different ideas of how they might want to present their future projects.   This was a great opportunity to learn from other students. 
     Achieve 3000 is a program that the students work on weekly.  This is a reading program that is on the computer and it focuses on non-fiction reading.  The students read articles and then answer questions about the article.  We have a contest each week between the other fifth grade teams and between our four classes as well.  These articles are given at each students reading level as determined by a pretest they took a few weeks ago.  Each article is written at many different levels so each student can be successful.  The expectation for all full weeks is that the students complete at least two articles at an average of 75% or higher.  The students are expected to go through the five steps for each article and that includes a writing step at the end called a Thought Question.  These are also leveled depending on their reading level.  Students completing the requirement each week receive a ticket to put in a box in the office and each quarter we have a drawing for a Kindle (one for each grade!)  Ask your child about what they have read on Achieve 3000 there are a lot of very interesting articles. 
    We hope you have a great week!