Week 5 newsletter

Can you believe it’s been five weeks? This week, you should have received your student’s midterm evaluation, signed it, and sent it back to school. We are over halfway through our first quarter (now there’s a problem involving fractions!).

Mrs. Trosen did a wonderful job this week filling in!  She helped students review for the math assessment, which was given on Tuesday.  I have updated Power School with the results, although there are still a few students who need to finish due to being absent Monday and/or Tuesday. Today I worked with students who scored less than 80% during small group and intervention time.  On Wednesday and Thursday the class covered addition of decimals, and focused on justifying their answers using the place value chart. 

While the students were hard at work with Mrs. Trosen, I was with 40 other educators from southeastern Iowa learning how to increase student engagement, deepen students’ level of mathematical understanding, and how to tweak my own teaching practices based on proven research. In fact, several times throughout the year, our classroom will become a “studio,” or an example classroom, where other teachers will come to observe how students are learning.  The first “studio” will occur in mid-October.

Please see the enclosed “Parent Roadmap” regarding helping your child with 5^th grade math. Take the time to read through it and explore the websites referred to within.

In science, Mrs. Trosen had the fun opportunity to cover information about the moon, and do an investigation that led into students discovering just how far away the moon is from the earth. We will be looking more in depth about the phases of the moon, and continue to talk about vocabulary, such as orbit, revolution, rotation, axis, waxing, waning, and more!