Mrs. Thomas's 'OWL'standing 5th Grade: 3.22.11

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

3.22.11

I disagree with his lack of enthusiasm...I LOVE spring!
How about you?!?

Well...SPRING has SPRUNG and I am so sorry I neglected to wish everyone a "Happy SPRING!" yesterday! In case you haven't noticed, our blog has had a makeover in the background department as I have decided to go with themes of the months/ seasons. I hope you enjoy them and look forward to change.

READING:

We began studying our skill of focus for this week which is summarizing what we read. Being able to summarize what we read is a crucial skill to the development and enrichment of our understanding and comprehension of the text at hand. To help us summarize the story in which we are reading, each group began making sequencing chains to retell some of the main events of the story. Using this chain, they will be able to compile the events into one summarizing sentence of the "gist" of the story.

We were able to get into groups which is always a great time! Remember, if your fluency folder comes home, you MUST reread that with an ADULT and have them sign off on it, and sign and return it in your folder by Friday of that week!

HOMEWORK: work on Spelling packets so you do not have homework this weekend since it's due Monday when we take the test!

MATH:

Well, we're here...we're at the subject that typically makes teachers and students alike want to run and hide. Not me. It's fractions and I love them! I love creating and implementing lessons that are fun and exciting and get the students to see that they aren't so bad and can actually be fun. We use fractions on a daily basis and don't even realize it! Today, we simply introduced this concept so students could understand the parts of a fraction and what they mean. We learned that fractions are dividing a whole into equal parts. The line in the middle of fractions is called the fraction bar; the number on the bottom is the denominator and represents how many parts the whole is broken into; while the top number is called the numerator and represents how many of the equal parts we have.

The WINNERS!

We discussed places where we can see fractions. After a rough start, we realized that cooking and recipes involves fractions, while eating a pizza, brownie, or piece of cake is a fraction as well. To emphasize that the larger the denominator means the small the piece, we played a game called pizza fractions. The students were divided into teams. Each team had a chance to spin the fraction spinner and had to locate the piece of pizza that represented the fraction on the spinner. The first team to create a WHOLE pizza with all their fractions one. Our students are quite competitive so it was a lot of fun!

HOMEWORK: complete "Colorful Fractions" worksheet. Also, if the worksheet we did in class was not completed ("Fraction Snack"), then that is homework as well.