First Full Week in the Books!

       This week the students completed their first full week of 5th grade!  We worked on our first PBL project dealing with the Olympics and we completed our first list of Knows and Need to Knows, wrote our first problem statement and we worked on some fun Olympic themed team building activities.  Students will be placed in all kinds of groups this year and we want to really work hard to provide them with lots of different opportunities.  They might not always "like" their group but we want them all to learn to work with all kinds of different people.  They are probably going to come home at some time this year complaining about their group or a member of their group.  We just ask that you listen to them and encourage them to work through their issues and follow their groups contract and to make sure one of the teachers is aware if things do not improve.  No group will be together for too long.  We have seen great things come from groups who do not start out as friends.  We have great expectations for this group and are very excited to see how they progress this year.
   
     We had a great turn out on Thursday evening for our Meet the Teacher night.  We appreciate all that came and you will find an information packet in the students Monday folder this week.  We are planning on holding an Echo night in September to help parents with understanding this new student management system.  There is a lot to this new program and we are working to learn all we can about it and share with the students.  For now have your students pull up their Echo and share what they know how to do so far.

      We have hit the ground running with this group and our classes as well.  In science they have begun to write in their science notebooks and did some "mystery sample" observations this week.  In math we are working on figuring out what fact families are our stumbling blocks as far as our multiplication and division facts.  (Students not passing the screener will be bringing home flash cards soon to practice.)  In Humanities, we have spent a lot of time working Achieve 3000 and learning how to use this program.  We have also done some Olympic reading and working on highlighting important things as we read and going back to look at the text to answer questions.
 
     We really are enjoying this group of students and we are off to a great start!  We can't wait to share more exciting things with them this year.