We had a great week this week and it was lovely to have so many students back in the classroom.  We have THREE WEEKS left!  Ms. Miller and I cannot believe how quickly this year has flown by!  We were just talking about how we will miss this class so much…but we won’t start thinking about quite yet!

Here’s a snapshot of what we have been doing this week:

Writing:  We have continued to look at fractured and traditional fairy tales and then chose which fairy tale we are going to fracture and write.  That will begin next week!

Science:  We continued our learning about the respiratory system.  Next week students will be introduced to the final project they will work on to display their learning about this fascinating system.

Math:  This week we finished our decimal unit and students wrote a quiz on Friday.  Next week we will continue our work with multi digit multiplication.

Reading We are looking at text features in non-fiction texts. This week we did a lot of practice trying to find various features in books from our school library.

Social Studies This week we used our new text features skills to identify how they can help us to better read and understand texts about immigration.

On Thursday we watched the movie Wonder in lieu of our field trip. We read this book as our first novel study of the year and it was fun to see how our imaginations and understanding of the story were similar and different to that of the movie interpretation.

June Calendar

Friday, June 4th Intermediate Sports Day

Friday, June 11th Intermediate Sports Day

Friday, June 18th Last Day of School & Noon Dismissal

Have a great weekend!

We hope you and your families are doing well and enjoyed the long weekend.  The classroom was quieter this week, with some students studying from home.  We took a step back last week, not wanting to jump into new material while many were not in the classroom.  Tomorrow we will resume our units and look forward to the final four weeks of school!

A Few Items…

Basketball Camp – there is room for your child in the outdoor basketball camp.  If you are interested in registering please email skrahn@highroadacademy.com. The camp runs on Tuesdays from 3:00 – 4:30 and was set to start tomorrow.  They have decided to delay the start by one week and it will begin next Tuesday.

Lindeman Lake Trip Cancelled – I wanted to post this one more time in case you missed it.

Track Meet – we are going to run a track meet for our intermediate department on Friday, June 4th.  Students will stay in their classroom groups and move through a variety of track and field events.  This will be a fun way to celebrate the work they have been doing in PE, and cheer on their classmates.

Intermediate Fun Day on Tuesday, June 15th – Students will go through a variety of stations with their classmates (they will stay in their cohort), including some water stations!  Please send along bathing suits, towels and sunscreen on the 15th!

Upcoming Dates:

Dear parents,

As we work through these recent challenges, there are several ways that you, as parents, can help us out! First of all, we would like to continue to strongly encourage you to drop-off as close to the 8:45 time as possible. For after school, students need to be picked up before 3:15 at the very latest so we can minimize the congregating of parents and students on the school property.

If your child will be staying home for the next while we have a list of suggested activities that are related to the topics we are studying in class:

Reading:  Students are encouraged to read a minimum of 30 minutes every day, this could be on their own or as a read aloud with an adult. If you are curious as to what your child has chosen to read here are a few discussion prompts to choose from at the end of their reading time:

• What has happened in the story so far?
• What do you think will happen next? Why?
• What emotions is the character feeling? How do you know?
• Are there some parts of this story that are more important than others? Which ones? Why are they most important?
• What’s the big idea in what you’ve read today?
• What questions would you like to ask the author right now?

Writing:  We are working to identify the different elements of a story.  If your child reads a chapter or picture book, have them identify the following:  setting, characters, beginning, middle and end of the story, the problem and how it was solved.  They can do this verbally or in written form.

Math:  We are working with decimals. Have your child look through the grocery story flyers to practice their addition and subtraction of decimals.  This can include things like planning a grocery shopping trip when given a set amount of money, planning a meal and seeing how much it would cost (and if they gave a certain amount, how much change would they get back), or seeing how much of one item they can purchase with a set amount of money (how many jugs of juice could you buy with $10).

Science:  We are learning about the respiratory system.  I would love students to research and find some cool facts about this body system.  They should write these facts out and represent them with a coloured picture.

Lindeman Lake:  Please note that the school has cancelled all upcoming field trips.  Unfortunately we will not be hiking Lindeman Lake on May 27th,

Thank you.

Mrs. Goosen & Ms. Miller

We had a lovely week this week and have the students have worked hard, despite the weather feeling like summer holidays!  It is hard to believe that we only have five weeks of school left! How time has flown by!  Here is a snapshot of what we did this week:

Math:  We worked on decimals and money as well as rounding decimals.  Next week we will finish our decimal unit and end with large digit multiplication.

Writing:  We have begun our story writing unit by looking at the elements of a story.  We will be focusing on both fractured and original fairy tales and use these as a springboard to write our own fairytale.

Science:  We started learning about the respiratory system.  We watched a couple of interesting videos, have done some reading and a few exercises that focus on our breathing.

French:  We wrote our quiz and have started a unit on colours.

Reading: We did an escape room using clues from our novel study. Congratulations to the team that broke out before the timer went off! This week we also completed our final Amal Unbound comprehension activities, these include final chapter questions, a plot diagram, a book summary, and an extra chapter. Anything that wasn’t completed during class time is due by Wednesday.

Tower of Books: The class began a reading challenge with the goal of each team reading a total of 40 books by the end of the school year. This week each group came up with a book themed name and started their reading. We are exploring different genres, summaries, and strategy during this challenge. Students are encouraged to read at home as well to help their team!

I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend and enjoyed the beautiful weather today!  My apologies that this is coming later than usual!  Here is a breakdown of what we did this week:

Math:  Students have worked hard on decimals and will be focusing on adding and subtracting decimals this week, as well as working with money.

Writing:  We have completed our poetry unit and students chose their poems for the poetry book.  A BIG congratulations to Jason who won this year’s poetry slam!  Well done, Jason!  This week we are starting a story writing unit.

Science:  We have come to then end of our digestive system unit and students will write a quiz tomorrow, before moving on to the respiratory system.

Bible:  Students completed their independent Bible study this week and learned what the Bible had to say about a variety of topics.  We are turning our attention to our LEADS program, which helps students deal with conflict, and integrating both picture books and Bible stories to help deepen our learning.

Reading: We finished Amal Unbound! The class was held in suspense until the final sentence when everyone cheered at the result of a happy ending. We will be continuing some activities related to the novel in the coming week.

Current Events: “Chasing a Prairie Fireball” is due on Wednesday.

Social Studies: This week we did a mini lesson combined with our Reading block on the history of silent reading and the English language. This included a look at ancient Hebrew, Latin texts, scriptio continua (writing without spaces), and an Indo-European family tree. This was to learn why silent reading is so new and how it changed the way we learn and communicate. Some great conversations were sparked.

Things coming up:

Lindeman Lake field trip form is coming home tomorrow.  We would love some parents to join us on this trip!  Please make sure your criminal record check is up to date at the office.

French Quiz on Tuesday:  A study guide came home last week.  Students will match up days of the week and months of the year.

It was another great week here in the Grade 5 classroom. Students have been working hard this week and we are proud of the progress we see them continuing to make, despite the warmer weather and the countdown to summer!  Here is a snapshot of what we have been working on:

Math – we have turned our attention to decimals and have been working on tenths and hundredths.

Writing – this week we finish up our poetry book and conclude our poetry slam.  Students will choose their four favourite poems and those will go into a poetry book.

Science – students started working on Digestive System output centers.  We will be finishing up this body system this week.

Reading – This week we focused on structuring summaries with specific language and redid a novel study assignment from last week. What an incredible improvement!

Current Events – We read about how scientists are trying to figure out how to grow food in Space! This assignment involves reading comprehension and deciphering important information. This is due on Wednesday.

Things Coming Up:

Tuesday, May 4th – Star Wars/Superhero Dress Up Day

Thursday, May 27th – Lindeman Lake Hike.  We would love parents to join us on this trip.  You will need to ensure that your criminal record check information is up to date at the office and meet us at the trailhead.  We will plan to leave school at 9:15 and return around 2:00.