This Week in 4th/5th

It was a short week due to Monday’s MLK, Jr. holiday. We jumped right back in where we left off last week: circulatory system activities, long division, and spelling. Many of these tasks were new/challenging and we are really proud of the resilience Gammas displayed throughout the week and across all content areas.

The Gammas are spearheading an effort to support our campus-wide community project: a drive to support our weekly food pantry with personal hygiene items and pet food. You will receive more details about this drive next week, but the Gammas have put great creative energy to use to help get other classes motivated to participate. Next week, we will send Gamma representatives to each class to help spread the word. Go, Gammas, go

It was a long-division-a-rama all the way around in math class for both groups. Year 1 Gammas continued to practice the standard algorithm with one digit divisors. Even when students felt like they were in the “pit of doom!” they were not! I cannot say enough how proud I am of this group’s willingness to try/risk and seeing their efforts pay off was so exciting! Year 2 kids left the world of fractions and began long division. We began by converting fractions to decimals using the standard algorithm for long division. We learned about terminating and non-terminating decimals and began discussion about converting decimals into percentages.(Spoiler alert: next week, we’ll host a “Bottle Flipping Olympics” where kids will get to apply some of these cool, new math skills!)

I’m out of room here , but look for an email coming soon explaining some options for ways to get Gammas more fact fluent–both for confidence and for speed/accuracy with mental math.

In ELA this week we continued on with our new launches from last week. Kiddos got spelling folders with individualized spelling lists that have words they still need some practice with. They also received new spelling lists for the week. Look for spelling folders to start coming home as P&P next week. We continued mapping out our fiction stories by thinking about genre, problem and solution, and main characters. We also dove a deeper into character mapping by thinking about character traits and actions for each main character in the story and how they will change. We are thinking really hard about our writing BEFORE we start so we can create great fiction stories! Just like the authors we love do! We continued to practice our accountable talk skills, chose new genres for our genre books clubs, and everyone checked out new books! Groups are exploring fantasy, mystery,, animal stories, humor, sci-fi, and biography this time around!

We are eating up learning about human body systems (no digestive system pun intended!) The Gammas have been quite engaged with this theme unit, and it has been cool to learn details about the complex systems that keep us alive! We completed study of the circulatory system on Monday and then dove into the respiratory system. Following the introduction of each new system we collaborate about how the different body systems depend on each other for homeostasis. (Note: We will move into the reproductive system after Parent Support Night. Feel free to come to that event with questions you may have about the puberty unit.)