Week of March 12 - 16

This week marks the beginning of the fourth quarter.  It is amazing how fast this year has gone.
Teachers will be finalizing grades from third quarter this week. All late work was due last week Friday, so hopefully students checked on that.

There will not be corrections for the tests we took last week.  Students knew that up front, and they will receive those tests back this week.

This week in the afternoons (last block) students will have the opportunity to experience Mini courses.  This is a wonderful opportunity and we are thankful to all of the parents and volunteers coming to teach classes.

5th Grade assignments March 12-16
Spelling review Tuesday - due Thursday
Thursday - Spelling Test
Rough draft of Fantasy story - due Thursday
Social studies test - possibly Friday - I will send an email

5th Grade Language Arts - Literature - We enjoyed reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe very much.  It had so many wonderful literary elements and Christian elements.  We will finish the movie sometime this week.
This week we will do some follow up work on this unit with Fairy tales.
Spelling/Grammar: There is a spelling test this week Thursday.  Review the words. We will come back to grammar at the end of this writing unit.
Writing: We are working hard on our rough draft fantasy stories.  The first draft will be due this week Thursday.  We will continue to work on specific elements of this writing before starting the revision and editing process.

Social Studies: Last week's Debate was awesome.  Both classes did a wonderful job portraying the historical figures and arguing the topics of that day.  It is one of my favorite events we do.  Thank you to the parents and grandparents who were able to spend that time with us. We are moving on to study the Declaration of Independence.  We may possibly be ready for the test at the end of this week, but I will let you know.

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6th Grade Literature:  We will continue this week doing some follow up work on ou Holocaust unit. We will be watching a wonderful documentary called Paper clips.  We will be taking notes on this and an eventual test.  If students are absent they will need to watch it outside of class in order to complete the work.  We will also be working on a group project involving limited research on this topic.

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New Reading Program:  March Madness Book Tournament for both 5th and 6th Grade:
On Monday we will introduce our 4th quarter March Madness tournament.  Based on a nationwide program we have chosen books/authors to compete against each other in a bracket style tournament.  Students will read as many of the qualifying books as they can over the course of the next month.  For each book they read, they will fill out a reading slip and rank the book on a 1-10 scale.  We will be keeping track of rankings for the tournament.  Students will again be given reading time in class and we will keep track of minutes read.
A list of the books will be posted on this blog under literature.

Blessings on your week,
Mrs. Brown