The 5th Grade Teachers would like to know your thoughts about math class. We’ve already had you respond to a correlation chart.
Now, we’re hoping you can take a few moments and fill out the survey at the link below. Just click on the link and get started. If you have any questions, ask your teacher for help. Thanks for helping us make your math class better.
The survey will remain live for the 3/18/16 school day.
Sometimes things get in the way of our success. These are setbacks. Another way to describe them are failures. For instance, you might get your math test back and learn that you missed most of the problems. Maybe you were absent for most of the math unit. You never really caught up with the class, and then you failed your test. Another example could be that you are training for a BMX bike competition and you wreck and break your wrist. Ouch! What now?
It’s really important that we don’t let these obstacles stop our journey to improve. It’s been said many times, “Success doesn’t come easy.” Those that understand this idea are able to persevere. This is being able to overcome the desire to just give up.
These are the stories we need to celebrate. Check out the video below about a surfer from Brazil.
What connections can you make with your own life?
Students have been working on different art assignments in the classroom. As a result, they’ve created a gallery of work. This work is focused on emphasizing the basic art elements like line, color, shape, space, value and texture. We’ve taken these elements and applied them to concepts like optical illusions and perspective drawing. Below are some of the current examples. This art comes from an activity posted on the Internet. I’m not sure who created the activity, but here’s a good website that describes the process for creating the blob art pieces.
Gallery 1
Wow. The trimester is over. The school year seems to be picking up speed. I’m really impressed with all of the efforts the students have made. Here are a few picks from the trimester that I wanted to share.
It wasn’t very long ago that students were working on cooperative games and building our classroom community. Our record for the Hula Hoop Challenge still stands at 1:03 minutes.
Students made good use of our classroom resources, new and old.
Scientists have begun to emerge as we learned a little about Environments.
We finished the trimester, and 2015, with a special project to decorate the classroom in a festive fashion. It really seemed to renew the values we set at the beginning of the school year for our classroom.
Some people got a little carried away. I suppose that’s normal in 5th grade.
Stay tuned for more posts on classroom events. Soon we should have students sharing their own news stories as they become contributors to the blog.
Over the past several months I’ve wondered whether or not we should have a blog. I haven’t posted anything for quite a while. In fact, sometimes I’m not even sure what to post. It’s like I’ve had a “writer’s block.” You know, when you’ve come to a point where you just can’t think of anything to write. For instance, your teacher asks you to brainstorm a list of ideas about the 10 Craziest Summer Moments from your last vacation. You sit and a small ball of energy bounces around in your stomach as you begin to think, This could be great! But that’s when it hits you. You can’t think of one crazy moment you had last summer that you could write about. Ahhh! That’s been happening to me a lot. So, I’ve placed the blog low on my list of things to do.
Trying to give our dog Zhosur a bath this summer was my Crazy Moment.
I came back to it recently as I’ve been thinking about what might help us accomplish our class purpose. It’s there on our tagline on the front page. A word was sticking out to me-“Fun.” That word is pretty important in education. It really helps to have an interest in what you’re doing to help with accomplishing your learning goals. This may not be possible all of the time, but we should make thing as enjoyable as possible in an effort to learn. Also, writing is pretty fun and kids like to share it with others. A blog could help us to do that.
Then it hit me. This doesn’t just have to be my blog. It could be our classroom blog. We could all contribute and work towards improving it. So, I’ve started a small learning journey. I came up with a question for the class:
“To what extent are you interested in having a classroom blog?”
We used a special tool to come to consensus. In short, most kids really liked the idea. In fact, only 1 student was completely opposed. So, I began asking more questions.
“What theme would you want to use to showcase our blog?”
The kids voted and decided to go with Cubic.
Then, I asked kids for suggestions for names. We talked about our blogging purpose and audience. We discussed blogging about classroom, school and education news topics. We figured most people reading would be kids, parents and teachers. This helped us to eliminate a few suggested Titles for the blog, like “Lebron James.” Pretty funny guys. Anyway, the new title is simple and clearly related to our work. “Mr. Magill’s Classroom”
I think the work has really just begun. I’m not sure where it’s headed, but stay posted to our blog, and hopefully we’ll have some more posts real soon that have been created with class input. I think it’s time to start fresh and share about the happenings that are going on in our classroom.
Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated every year in classrooms around the world. What did he do that’s made people stop and think about our society? In the US, it’s so significant that schools must provide an assembly for students at their school during January. This makes me think about 2 Essential Questions.
Who was Martin Luther King Jr.?
Why do we remember him?
Use the following link to process these questions.
http://www.nea.org/tools/lessons/mlk-day-gradesK-5.html
Today I shared another video with the kids. But before I embed it into this post, let’s remember the reason for sharing it.
The video talks about what we’ve learned about sleep through the help of good science. Some of it is very complicated, but it simplifies one thing in particular, how sleep is connected to learning. If we don’t get good sleep, we struggle to help our bodies in a number of ways. For example, we become more forgetful. So, staying up all night to study for a test isn’t really helpful. In fact, we’d be better off getting more sleep the night before a test, versus staying up late to study for it.
I asked kids what their optimal level (just right amount) of sleep would be and to share it with a friend. Zaira said 8 hours. It’s different for everyone, but typically, most people say they need 8 hours. A young person generally needs more, like 10 hours because they’re growing. Next, I asked kids to figure the amount of sleep they were able to get last night and share it with a neighbor. Then, I asked to show me with their thumbs if they exceeded their optimum (thumbs up), maintained their optimum (thumbs sideways) and didn’t get their optimum (thumbs down). Wow! Most kids had their thumbs down. Are we sleep deprived? We would really need to investigate it more to know for sure. Remember that good science would be based on more than one trial.
Here’s the video
I leave you with one question. Are you willing to study your own sleep habits?
Recently, your teachers have been asking you to dig deeper into the texts that you’re reading. They’re not just asking you to identify the setting of a story, or the main character. Now, they’re pushing you to answer a question and support it with evidence from the story. For instance, after reading about Warren Faidley in the “Eye of the Storm” you might be asked to explain why Warren moves to different parts of the country depending on the season to take photos. How would you answer this question? That’s right you’d need to go back and reread the text. Then, you’d have to use the text to explain your answer. Recently, NPR did a story on some 5th graders doing this in their class. Go to the story and listen to these students in action.
NPR: “Common Core Reading: Difficult, Dahl, Repeat”
Is this really any different than what you’ve had to do in the past?
Maybe it’s new, or perhaps you’ve been doing this in other classrooms too. Now, the Common Core Standards are demanding you to do this more often. Why?
Here’s an example of what it might look like.
Try it with partners. Look back in the story “Eye of the Storm” to answer the following question:
Do you think Warren would face any danger in order to get a spectacular storm shot? Use facts from the selection to support your answer.
Recently, we started a Book Club for Radio 5th Grade, by Gordon Korman. Yesterday we started to talk more about this story in a small group setting, a book talk group. We thought about what that would look like. There were certain things we would look for during a Book Talk.
It would look like….
It would sound like….
Here’s a video that shows one way a group might proceed during a Book Talk.
The volume for the students sharing isn’t great, but if you pay attention to the subtitles, it gives you an idea of how a Book Talk process might flow.
Today we’re starting book club. Most students will read a story during the week and practice answering text dependent questions related to that book. The first book we’ll look at is Radio 5th Grade.
This is a Gordon Korman book. He’s written books you might have heard of before. His books include: Swindle, Ungifted and the 39 Clues series. This book is about Benjy Driver, who’s passion is focused on a school radio show.
He soon finds out that having a hit radio show is a seriously hard thing to manage. He struggles with keeping his homework exploits a secret; a crazy bully reading stories about kittens; and an uncooperative parrot; in order, to keep his radio station show afloat.