3.11.15 - DAY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT

It's Wednesday!!!  Wooo Hooooo...halfway done with this week!  First, I would like to thank you parents that attended our forum last night.  Your care and concern is of utmost importance to us and it is important that our communication is open throughout the remainder of this school year.  We love your babies so much and our focus is upon them...their health...their happiness...their knowledge...their success as a student and citizen of SMA and our society.  Thank you so much for submitting your concerns and allowing us to address them with you so that we may develop an action plan and grow in our journey towards your student's overall academic success.  We truly have the BEST students, parents, and families here at Saint Mary!

CONGRATULATIONS: KAYLA is our Young Authors WINNER for 5th grade!!! WooooooooHooooooo!!!  We are so, sooooo very, VERY EXTREMELY proud of you!!!

There was no Terra Nova testing today due to the Archery Tournament, so we resumed with a normal schedule.

LANGUAGE ARTS:
LEARNING TARGET: I CAN identify and describe characteristics of historical fiction.  I CAN use clues from a text to determine the historical era.
We discussed the characteristics of historical fiction and why these are important for determining the genre.  We then looked at how these characteristics can help us to determine which era of history a specific text takes place and then put our background knowledge of that era into helping us visualize the events of the text.  The students have completed their lessons from the Benchmark Literacy text, but since we are immersed within Terra Nova testing, I will not be giving them their unit assessment until this testing is complete.  Thus, we are reviewing the fundamentals of historical fiction in preparation for their unit assessment next week.  To practice these identifying characteristics and traits, we read an excerpt from "Meet Addy" which is an American Girl book.  While basic in nature, these books offer a terrific glimpse into a certain era in American history (the Civil War, World War II, Victorian times, Colonial times, Westward expansion, etc.).  We identified clues that helped us to infer and draw conclusions upon the time in which Addy lived (Addy lived in a windowless, dirt floored cabin and her parents discussed "masters", "being sold", and escaping to freedom or fighting for freedom with the Union soldiers so we were able to determine that she was a slave on a southern plantation during the Civil War).

Students then got with partners and selected another book of historical fiction where they read to find clues to the era of history.

HOMEWORK: none (Terra Nova testing), BUT reminder: please be reading books for our BOOK MADNESS!  What will our 2015 book of the year be?!?

MATH:
LEARNING TARGET: I CAN add fraction with unlike denominators.
Students should recognize that using the least common denominator (LCD) to rename fractions before adding eliminates the need to work with fractions with larger numerators and denominators and simplifies the process of expressing sums in lowest terms.  In this lesson, students also learned that the commutative and identity properties of addition apply to fractions as well as whole numbers. We completed workbook page 51 in class and have several practice pages for application of this skill to complete tomorrow in class.
Here are our notes from today's focus:

HOMEWORK: none (Terra Nova testing)

REMINDER: Students have a VOCABULARY test tomorrow!!!

Terra Nova testing resumes tomorrow!  See you bright and early and I hope you arrive bushy tailed!
xoxo,
Mrs. Thomas