October 22 - 26

Thank you to each and every family for spending some time with us this week.  We really enjoyed our conversations and are excited to see the amazing things your student accomplishes throughout the year!!

Here are some pictures of our Karaoke Party on Wednesday!

Social Studies
 Students took their chapter 1 test on geography on Wednesday.  Look for the results to come home early next week.    We have started on chapter 2, Native Americans.   Students will focus mostly on how the Natives came to settle in North America and where they chose to settle.  We will be synthesizing this information by practicing writing summaries about what we have read about in our textbook.    This is a shorter chapter, so look for the chapter 2 test to be coming soon!

DG
 The DG 2 quiz will be this Tuesday, October 30, 2018.  Students will then receive DG 3 and it will be due on November 7, 2018.    Have fun looking at maps!

Science
Students planned and conducted an investigation centered around the effect of water's temperature on dissolving a substance. All students found, based on their data, that hot water dissolves solids, like sugar, much faster than cold water. We even graphed a scatter plot as a class to show the correlation between the temperature and time! Students watched simulation of water molecules in cold and hot water. They were able to apply this new understanding to their investigations as a part of their reasoning for the claim that: Hot water dissolves sugar faster than cold water.

Reading
This week we've been continuing to read complex nonfiction texts. We focused on looking at tricky vocabulary words by looking around and in the word to try to find its meaning. Later on in the week we zeroed in on text structure and noticed that when nonfiction text gets more complex, the structure is more of a hybrid. Throughout one section of text, there may be multiple structures.

Writing
  Students have been having a blast collecting multiple news stories from around Leonard.   They have used their reporter badges to "gain access" to different classrooms and interview students about what they are learning.   Our fifth graders are drafting 3 -5 stories and then will take one story and publish it. 
On Monday, Patrice Rowbal, a reporter for our Troy School District newspaper, will be here to talk all things Journalism with our students.  I know they will gain a lot of expertise from listening to and working with a real live journalist!

Math
This week in math, we started a new Unit on Multiplying in Dividing Fractions. We worked on multiplying fractions by a whole number, and drawing comparison bars.