Haunted House and Parent Education Night

Halloween is almost here! We are in the planning stages for our haunted house, and will finalize our plans early next week. We do not have access to the music room until after 3pm on Thursday, October 30th, so I am looking for volunteers to help me put our plan into action. Parents, please email me if your child can stay after school to build the Haunted House. Until we are finished, they will not get signed into aftercare. Parents are invited to help, too! I imagine it will take a couple of hours to complete the project, though I am unable to give an exact completion time. 

In other news, a parent education night is coming up! Many of you have expressed to me that you would like to learn more about BPC's math program. To this end, we are offering a parent education event for Lower School parents on Thursday, October 30. Math Explored with Vera Balarin, BPC Math Specialist, 7:00 - 8:30 pm, Library. I hope you can come!

5th Grade Happenings

Today our buddies performed their dress rehearsal! Enjoy these buddy and sibling photos from after the show. The 5th graders were a great audience. 

Fifth grade is a busy place these days! As students become more comfortable with 5th grade expectations and routines become, well, routine, we are moving along through the curriculum at a faster clip. Here are some curricular highlights:

History: Students are wrapping up investigations into what life was like in the Americas, Europe, and West Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas. Students are learning that each continent supported thriving cultures, and will thus have context for when these regions become intertwined during the period of European exploration. Next week we will explore Columbus's voyages, and the following week we will begin new research projects on European explorers. Detailed assignment sheets will be available on paper and posted to the blog once the projects are announced. 

Math: We are looking at contexts for adding fractions with unlike denominators. Specifically, we are using money and clocks to provide an easy way to determine fractional amounts. For example, students can look at a clock and see that one third of an hour is 20 minutes, and then can add one third to one half (30 minutes) to easily see an answer of 50 minutes, or 5/6 of an hour. 

For resources, check out this interactive clock model or this blog post about our curriculum's methods. 

Reading: We are reading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Headless Cupid together, enjoying discussions as well as analyzing the author's technique for inspiration for our own novels. Ask your child about Amanda, David, Janie, Blair, and Tesser!

Writing: We are writing brief pieces analyzing Ms. Snyder's technique, as well as preparing for our upcoming novel, in a more traditional way. Students work in their NaNo workbooks at their own pace and some are storyboarding key scenes in their novel for inspiration. Excitement is building! In the coming weeks, we will discuss typing versus handwriting and select a way to enable our best writing come November. 

Join us for the NaNoWriMo Kickoff party. Check out the flyer here.

Link to Math Activity

Today Ms. Duncan showed me a great activity that supports this month's Number Corner, and we played around with it as a class for a few minutes. Many of the kids wanted to check it out themselves, so here's the link: http://www.fi.uu.nl/toepassingen/00247/toepassing_wisweb.en.html

Family Letter re: Math Unit 2

Attached is a letter from the Bridges Math Curriculum regarding our next math unit. Please let me know if you have any questions. I will update this site periodically with games and activities that support our work in this unit.

Unit 2 Family Letter

NaNoWriMo Coming Up!

A few shots from our preview performance on Thursday!

Now that our amazing performance is behind us, it's time to focus on two exciting October events -- The Haunted House and NaNoWriMo. We will discuss both of these events in class, but I will summarize the highlights here for you. 

The Haunted House project is an opportunity for the 5th grade to really work together as a team to complete a project. Though they receive adult support to carry out their ideas, it is our goal that students really take ownership of this project. Therefore, if your child shares with you ideas that seem somewhat unrealistic, try asking questions that encourage them to figure out more reasonable goals. Try to avoid telling them what won't work.

NaNoWriMo is approaching! Unlike last year, we will not spend time working page-by-page through the workbook (though self-paced workbook time will be provided in class). 5th graders are expected to prepare in the way that best works for them, which may include the workbook, or may include storyboarding or other techniques. It is most important that excitement builds for the big event, so I will try to keep the planning process from feeling like a chore. Please let me know if your child is feeling stressed, and we can work together to lessen any anxiety. 

Write-Ins are a successful way for many students to meet their word count goals (or catch up on a few days' worth of words). We unfortunately do not have staff to run write-ins on parent-conference days (Monday and Tuesday, November 3rd and 4th), so I encourage parents to set up their own write-ins. I have included instructions from Kira Del Mar about running your own write-ins. Let me know if you need any additional support!

Tips for running a NaNo write-in:

• Provide space and time for writing, but also allow for breaks, chatting, and wanderings-of-attention. Storytelling is hard work, and it's rare that students will write uninterrupted for more than 30-40 minutes at a time.
• Remind writers to stop and count their words about every page or two (we use the counting and labeling by 10s method: count 10 words and write a small '10' above that word, count another 10 and write '20,' etc. until the bottom of a page, where you write the whole-page total).
• Run occasional word sprints. These should be 5-10 minutes each (I usually go for 6, 7, or 8). Here's the procedure we usually follow:
• Who'd like to word sprint? If you're participating (which you don't have to), put a star after the last word you just wrote, so you know where to count from when you finish the sprint.
• This will be a ____ minute word sprint.
• Shake out your hands, make sure your pencil is sharpened, and ready, set, write!
• Give a warning at the half-way point and the one minute mark, then count down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, pencils down, hands up!
• Pause to give writers time to count their words, then collect word counts.
• Encourage students to beat their own best time, comparing their previous work to their current work. 
• We usually do word sprints about every 15-20 minutes, or when there are at least 4 or 5 people ready to participate.
• Remember that NaNo is about creativity and storytelling, not about proper grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc., so resist the urge to correct any errors you may observe over writers' shoulders.
• Entirely optional: we sometimes provide small reward treats that students can collect when they reach milestones like 50% or 100% of their daily goal. These can be snacks like marshmallows or strawberries, or things like stickers or erasers. I'd be happy to provide some for you if you end up hosting.