Monday, October 31st

Happy Monday and Happy Halloween!

We enjoyed a fun day of learning and several Halloween related activities.

Some (not all) genius hour groups explored phases of matter by making Oobleck and chemical reactions with vinegar and baking soda to make slimy worms dance.  Ask your child about these experiments!

We prepared for our division assessment tomorrow, working through multi-step word problems.  Students did a great job refining their strategies and are ready for tomorrow.

We had a HUGE responsibility today, as students exercised their right to vote in our student council elections.  We went to The Falcon's Nest and cast our vote in a similar manner as adults, I voted sticker and all!

 We enjoyed reviewing our term 2 goals and reflecting on whether or not we accomplished them.  We then set new goals for term 3.  Students enjoyed a quick Halloween "Would your rather" and word search activity, and enjoyed Halloween stories from our guest reader, Ms. Crooks.

What a great day!  In communication folders, you will find an envelope with Math-a-thon prizes.  Please use this envelop to collect your pledges.  I have also sent home new pledge forms.

Have a great night!!  Stay safe!

Thursday, October 27th

Happy Thursday!

We had a busy morning, reviewing our division strategies and preparing for our end of module division assessment next week.  Students utilized word problem strategies to solve problems involving division.

We had a relay race review for our assessment over the colonies tomorrow.  Students worked in teams to race and sort the characteristics of each colonial region.  They then worked as a team to correct anything that was in the incorrect location.  Ask your child to tell you more!

 Our colonies dioramas are coming along.  They are turning out great!  Students are putting a lot of thought and creativity into their representations of each region.

Thanks for your participation in the Math-a-thon!  Tonight is the final night, and then it is time to collect your pledges.

Have a nice evening!

Wednesday, October 26th

Don't forget about explorations!  If you have an interesting career or hobby that you would like to share with a small group of 4th and 5th graders, please email me.  I happy more than happy to assist you with materials, set up, and management.  This is a great opportunity to share your amazing work or hobbies with our kids!  It can be anything!

College & Career Explorations, November 15th

Each year at F.AVE, we offer students a chance to learn about different careers and college opportunities in our community. But we need your help, parents!

We need parent and community volunteers to come in and teach our students all about your amazing career! In the past, we have had a wonderful variety of classes to offer: sports clinics, cake decorating, architecture, disease prevention, real estate, poetry writing, cooking classes about sushi or French food, and so much more! What do you have to offer F.AVE students to open their world up to new ideas and opportunities?

Our first exploration will be on Tuesday, November 15th from 8:30 - 10:00 AM. The session will be 90 minutes, so we do suggest time for a presentation, some discussion, and a hands-on activity. If you would like a teacher's help, contact your child's teacher ahead of signing up, perhaps they can partner with you!

Sign Up Here - Deadline to sign up is midnight on Sunday, November 6th.

If you have any questions, please contact our media specialist, Corinne Smith at cosmith@csdecatur.net or contact your child's classroom teacher.

Monday, October 24th

Welcome back!  I hope you enjoyed your weekend.

We are hitting the ground running this week with division.  Students are solidifying their place value strategy using number disks, and are moving on to partial quotients using friendly multiples.  This strategy allows students to use multiples that THEY are comfortable with to solve division equations that have a up to four-digits in the divisor and one-digit dividends.  Students will practice some mental division for homework tonight.  They should complete as many problems as they can.  This is an un-timed activity, and should have no more that 25 minutes spent on it.

We previewed a Time For Kids on finance.  Students worked to read, and reflect on the information presented in the text.  The completed a reflection sheet, explaining questions that are still lingering.

Students excitedly began a project to explain our inquiry into the colonies.  They are working to create models of their particular region, and worked to plan their ideas today.

I hope you had a chance to get on Sumdog over the weekend.  Math-a-thon is happening every day this week, so play on and get those points!

We are excited to have our first round of explorations happening on November 15th!  This is a great time to showcase and have students explore some of the exciting careers or extra curricular interests that all of you have.  If you are interested in leading an exploration, sign up using the link below.  I am happy to assist you during your exploration.

College & Career Explorations, November 15th

Each year at F.AVE, we offer students a chance to learn about different careers and college opportunities in our community. But we need your help, parents!

We need parent and community volunteers to come in and teach our students all about your amazing career! In the past, we have had a wonderful variety of classes to offer: sports clinics, cake decorating, architecture, disease prevention, real estate, poetry writing, cooking classes about sushi or French food, and so much more! What do you have to offer F.AVE students to open their world up to new ideas and opportunities?

Our first exploration will be on Tuesday, November 15th from 8:30 - 10:00 AM. The session will be 90 minutes, so we do suggest time for a presentation, some discussion, and a hands-on activity. If you would like a teacher's help, contact your child's teacher ahead of signing up, perhaps they can partner with you!

Sign Up Here - Deadline to sign up is midnight on Sunday, November 6th.

If you have any questions, please contact our media specialist, Corinne Smith at cosmith@csdecatur.net or contact your child's classroom teacher.

Friday, October 21st

Happy Friday!  We had a great field trip today!  Here are some pictures from our day, and check your email for our weekly recap.  Have a great weekend!

Thursday, October 20th

We had a wonderful Thursday!

We did it!!!  Thank you so much for your support of our kids an our school!

The two homeroom classes with the most student registrations in the Fifth Avenue 5K and the Mayor's Mile were:

4th Grade = Callie Sanders

5th Grade = Julie McFaddin

Each class will receive a recess bag that their homeroom will keep and enjoy whenever they go on the playground! Congrats to all and thanks for helping make this event a huge success! 

Fastest F.AVE Girl and Boy in the Mayor's Mile!

Katie Sanders - 7:32

Abel Florence - 7:13

Fastest F.AVE Girl and Boy in the Fifth Avenue 5K!

Anna Blaich - 23:19 

Sam Corso - 20:52

We continued utilizing number disks for division.  Homework tonight will practice this strategy.  When rotating in station, students used manipulatives for divisiion with me, and played monster division games.  They also worked on Xtramath and Compass Learning.

We enjoyed a science lesson from Ms. Craig!  She helped solidify our understandings of the solar system, and gave demonstration in relative distance and phases of the moon.

We began taking our research to our planner today during writing.  We are almost finished with our plans for the body of our nonfiction pieces and will work to develop the introduction and conclusions before drafting.

We are looking forward to our walking field trip to Adair Park tomorrow.  Be sure to wear comfortable clothes and shoes.  It will likely be in the 50s and 60s during our trip, so bring a jacket.

Have a great night!

Wednesday, October 19th

Happy Wednesday!

We continued utilizing place value strategies for division.  Students are working to distribute number discs on a place value chart and decompose groups of ten to ones.  See the video link for more help.
https://vimeo.com/141783023

Student utilized a previously read text to decide what nonfiction text feature that they would add to the text to help readers understand it better.  Students decided anything from a timeline, to a map, to bold faced words would benefit the reader.  They were able to explain why adding this feature would assist the reader and use examples from the text to support their thinking.

We inquired into the relative distance of planets.  Students were given a sentence strip as they began to explore distance.  The sentence strip represented our entire solar system.  After writing the word sun at the top, the class was asked to list the planets on the sentence in a place that represented that planets distance from the sun.  After listing all of the planets, we flipped our sentence strips and completed some folding and labeling to create a more scaled (although not actually scaled) model of the relative distance of the planets to the sun.  Ask your child to tell you what new understandings they now have!

We are looking forward to our field trip on Friday!  We will be leaving the school at 8:15 and returning around 12:00.

See the below for a message from Maestra Wagner:

¡Saludos F.AVE familias!

Though it is difficult to believe, we are already approaching the end of our first term of the school year!  September 6 - 9, Spanish classes will be assessed over Listening and Writing. 

Please be on the lookout for our mid-term vocabulary quiz in the red communication folder.  It is very good indicator of your child’s progress this term and which areas he/she may need to work on before the end of term assessments.  If your child simply neglected to write an “el” or “la” or accents are missing, yet the response was marked as incorrect, please do not be concerned.  If your child wrote a completely different word, I would recommend Quizlet practice before the end of term assessments. 

And as always, for extra, at-home review, please visit our Quizlet page and practice Term One activities:

https://quizlet.com/subject/fourfiveacademy/

¡Gracias! 

Maestra Wagner

hwagner@csdecatur.net

http://favespanish.weebly.com/

Have a great day!

Monday and Tuesday, October 17th and 18th

Happy first two days of the week!

It was been a busy and nice start!

We continued adding to our research for our writing pieces on our country.  Today, students focused on the reasons people would have wanted to found/develop their country.  They inquired into the landscape, climate, and much more!  We are prepared to begin our prewriting later this week.

We enjoyed an inquiry lesson from Ms. Holden today.  She asked the question, "Why do we have seasons?"  Students utilized models and flashlights to demonstrate Earth's revolution around the sun on its tilted axis.  Ask your child why we have seasons (it's not because we are closer to the sun :))!

Students began to develop a business plan as though they lived in the different colonial regions.  They explored the natural resources available, the human and capital resources necessary to make their product or provide their service.

We explored expository nonfiction text by examining a passage on immigration to the United States in the 1800s.  Students reflected in their reading journals about how the features in their excerpt assisted their understanding of the text.

We are looking forward to our field trip on Friday.  If you are a chaperone, we will begin walking at 8:15, so we will see you in our classroom around that time.

We have one more walking field trip coming up.  Forms were sent home in communication folders on Monday.  Please send those in asap.  Thank you!

We've had a pleasant week, with lots of learning!  Keep it up Superstars!!

Wednesday, October 12th

What a nice day we had!

It's amazing the opportunities that technology provides!  Our students worked so hard on their Google Slides presentation for Genius Hour.  They are working through Google Drive and are able to complete tasks on the same presentation simultaneously.  It's great to see their creativity shine!

We continued our work with division today.  Students are utilizing arrays and translating them into area models.  They are working to determine quotients, and quotients with remainders.  We utilized graph paper to create our models today.

Students worked to inquire into different technology used for exploration.  They worked to match pictures and content to complete research on different tools used for exploration.  Some are used today, like GPS.

Tomorrow is F.AVE spirit wear, and Friday is DHS spirit wear.  Have a great day!

Tuesday, October 11th

Happy Tuesday!

We continued our research on our countries.  We discussed that finding the information is difficult because you want it to "be right in front of you," but you have to search for it.  We discussed some strategies, such as skimming for important words or dates, to help with finding important information.

We began diving into division today.  Students used number disks to model division word problems with and without remainders.  They also played a factor capture game.  Ask your child to tell you more!

We enjoyed a lesson from Mrs. Patino about taking responsibility.  Students listened to and discussed a book in which the main character blames mistakes and getting in trouble on many different things, instead of admitting to his own mistakes.  We reflected about how we take responsibility at school.

Tomorrow's dress up day is Historical Figure Day.

See you in the morning!

Monday, October 10th

We are off to a wonderful start this week!

A day in pajamas didn't slow us down a bit!  We eagerly began working during genius hour.  Some groups are working to create their presentations for their Million Dollar project.  They shared their slides through Google Drive, so they are able to work on them with their partner simultaneously.

We spent some time reviewing factors, multiples, prime, and composite numbers.  Students worked in stations to create factor rainbows, and review several math skills from our previous weeks such as expanded and word form, rounding, multiplying multiples of ten, and more.

Students were asked to remain in the hallways with a partner after lunch.  They played the role of settlers.  With their partners, they determined were in the classroom would be a good place to "settle."  They were asked to explain the reasons they settled in their location, and what resources they had available to be successful in the classroom.  Did they have everything that they needed?  If not, what would they do to get what they needed?  We had a great discussion and are already beginning to understand the perspective of Europeans arriving to settle in the America and establish the thirteen colonies.  Ask your child to tell you more!

It's Superhero Day tomorrow and historical figure day on Wednesday!

Have a great night!