Mrs. McGinty's Class Blog: 5th Grade Updates

Kindergarten Buddies

Last week, 5th graders met their Kindergarten Buddies. Our class has partnered with Mrs. Godier's Kindergarten class, so the 5th grade students can serve as mentors to our school's youngest students. We will meet with our buddies occasionally to help them with projects and activities throughout the year. It is so neat to see the older kids rise to the occasion and jump right in to be positive role models and helpers to the younger students.

Character Kids

Last week, I awarded this year's very first Character Kid Award to Asa! This is an award that I give occasionally to a student who has shown great character at school. As a class we talked about what it means to have character. We decided that honesty, kindness, effort, and empathy are all qualities and behaviors that show character. Congrats to Asa for being an all-around great kid and setting a great example for others.

Classwork

The past two weeks in reading we have been using some different graphic organizers to help us summarize the most important details of a story or text. Look for some of these to come home in Friday Folders.

In writing, we have finished brainstorming ideas for our personal narratives, and students have chosen a small moment to write about. Students are beginning to plan out their stories and make notes about the details they remember from that moment. Today we looked at some past student examples of narratives and discussed things that these authors did well and some things we think they could improve upon.

In our first math unit, students are learning how to find area and volume (with fractions! eek!) and write expressions with grouping symbols. This week, we took a mid-unit quiz. Students have seen their graded quizzes, and we have gone over all the problems and corrected our mistakes. This quiz isn't recorded for a grade, but instead used as a tool to see what we need to continue to practice before our Unit 1 test next week.

In Science, we are learning about matter in ecosystems. This week students worked in small groups to create a model to show how energy is passed from the sun to the producers, consumers, and decomposers in a food chain.