Hi Parents,

Today at our 5th Grade Planning Retreat, we were discussing what sort of field trips we could plan for your children this year, and you came up in the conversation. In the past, we have had field trips to GM as one of our 5th grade parents worked there; it was a real blast for the kids to see how different parts of the factory and offices worked and the visit complimented our Science units on Inventions, and on Models and Designs beautifully.

So… where do YOU work? How do you spend your days? Is there any way you could allow our students a peak into your busy world? We know this won’t be an option for all parents, but if you believe that your occupation might have something to offer our students, whether it be us coming to you for a fully fledged field trip, or you would be able to come in and share your story with us like Annette’s Dad Wayne will be doing during our Inventors Unit… then please, PLEASE, drop us a line so WE can learn from YOU!

In other news, we had a great time this week in class, so many fun things are going on right now. We finished our fantastic Read-A-Loud, The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had by Kristin Levine which taught us many things about friendships and standing up for what you believe. We continued in our social issues book clubs, some groups even moving onto their second novel; engaging in rich and thought provoking discussions and learning valuable lessons along the way, our second personal narrative was read, reviewed, revived and re-written on its way to being published next Monday and we divided our time nicely as we moved through our 4th unit in math. If you have not checked out the division movies in the previous post, please do so now, (although remember they won’t work at home without a VPN). I am sure these movies will be of help to you as we prepare for our test next Thursday. So will this list of what will be on the Unit 4 Test:

· Find multiples and use them to rename numbers
· Know and use multiplication facts
· Divide using a friendly numbers strategy with the partial-quotients algorithm
· Divide using “at least…not more than” strategy  with the partial quotients strategy
· Make magnitude estimates with decimals
· Measure and draw line segments to the nearest half inch
· Estimate using a map scale
· Write an open number sentence for number stories
· Determine what to do with a remainder

There were more exciting things going on this week too; did I mention our Brownie ‘Throwdown’ Bobby Flay Style? Happy Birthday to Pepo and Erika, we LOVED both of your brownies…