This week guest bloggers Kelli and Samantha will let you know what has been keeping us busy in room 23. 

We have just finished creating PowerPoint presentations for the 13 colonies.  We researched a colony with a partner and then designed slides to teach our classmates about our colony.  We got our pictures off of the Internet to paste on our slides.  We learned to put only one to three words on our bullets.  We learned how to create different backgrounds and have different fonts.  We presented them to the class on the Smartboard. 

We have started our final copies for our personal essays.  We have been working on our rough drafts for about two weeks.  We created a thesis which we must support with specific details.  Hopefully we will be able to persuade our reader to agree with our thinking.

We are finishing up our Andrew Clements author study.  We read lots of his books and completed activities with them.  Some of the books were Things Not Seen, The Report Card, A Week in the Woods, The Janitor’s Boy, Jake Drake Teacher’s Pet, The Landry News and Things Hoped For.  We are now into our second literature circle book.  After that we will write to Mr. Clements, and hopefully he will write back!

 

We are beginning to learn about our earth materials.  We have learned about soil and weathering, rocks and minerals.  We determined different types of rocks by looking at their properties.  We have read about the different types of soil and what effects soil, and how weathering can make caves.  Weathering can also change rocks formation.   

 

 

The fifth grade has just performed it’s winter chorus concert.  Some of the songs were Time of My Life, Dance a Jig, and Just One Small Voice.   In Open Circle we have been learning about leadership. Some children go into kindergarten and first grade classrooms during recess and morning work to help the students learn their flashcards.  Our whole class will be starting buddies with Miss Nally on Tuesday of this week.  We will be helping the children learn how to read!