What's Up in 5th Grade?

                           What's Up in 5th Grade?

Calendar

• Thursday, December 15th--12:45 Spelling Bee                             (Parents of participants are invited.)
• Wednesday, December 21st-Tuesday, January 3rd--                              No school for Winter Break
• School resumes Wednesday, January 4th, 2023
• Monday, January 16th-No school for                                                      Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
• Friday, January 20th--No school for semester grade reporting
• Monday, January 23rd--beginning of  3rd quarter
• Friday, January 27th--Wright application due date at 4:00 pm

New News......

• Badger Rock Middle School --The lottery is technically open as of December 1st (link) for application 
• Dear Families:
  
  
  This week, your student learned about an opportunity to enter their creative work into a local contest called the Greater Dane Anthology Project. They can enter art, a cartoon, poetry, a short story, or a persuasive essay. Here's the slide deck that was shared with your student. If your student is interested in participating in this, they'll need to get their work to Amy Rountree, the Advanced Learning Specialist at Randall, by December 16. 

Oldie, but goodies ..... 

• To learn more about the work of the Advanced Learning Advisory Committee, you can visit this site. 
• The Wright lottery is open and and closes on  January 27, 2023 @ 4:00pm
• The Randall School Spelling Bee will be on December 15 at 12:45 pm in the auditorium. Families of participating students may attend this event if they would like. Students can choose to participate, though if more than 3 students from a fifth grade classroom are interested, there will be a classroom bee to choose three students to attend. If you would like a copy of the school spelling bee study list, you can access it here. The National Spelling Bee draws its word list from children's books, and this year's book list is also available here.

5th Grade Math this week....

• December Number Corner--This month we will be creating and discussing scatter plots using personal height and feet measurement data.  We will also be looking at a classification of quadrilaterals and their unique characteristics based on pairs of parallel sides, congruent sides and congruent angles. 
• Ask your kiddo why a why a square is always a kite and a rhombus, but a kite is not always a square and a rhombus is not always a kite??  And, is a rhombus a square every single time?? 
• On Monday, we took the Unit 3 Post-assessment (These will be coming home!!)
• On Wednesday and Thursday students took the Bridges Interim Assessment to see what they have learned and retained so far this year in our math curriculum
• Then we started Unit 4 --Multiplication and Division strategies for whole numbers and fractions with a pre-test.
• Yes....a week of tests. Sorry about that, 5th graders!  
• Next week we will be revisiting some multiplication strategies for multi-digit multiplication.

Literacy this week....

•  Our theme for Module 2--Rainforests. 
• This week we started by comparing and contrasting two texts about rainforests.  We found evidence and answered the question "Why do scientists explore the rainforest?"
• We did some vocabulary work and added to our word walls.
• We continued to examine and compare various graphic organizers and use them with nonfiction texts to gather new information.

Science this week....

• Our new unit is:  Modeling Matter
• Our guiding question for this unit is: What happens when two substances are mixed together?
• We finished up the chapter where we examined: Why do some salad dressings have sediments and other do not?
• We began our third and final chapter where we will investigate: Why can salad dressing ingredients separate again after being mixed?
• We plan to finish up this unit by Winter Break. 
• After Winter Break, we will do a mini-unit on working  with maps of the United States before we begin our next science unit: Earth Systems.

SELS this week...

• Determining the size of a problem and an appropriate reaction for the problem.
• Randall's behavior incentive goal for December and we are focusing on Bathroom Behavior
• December's Goal for the whole school:  1,000 Paws
• December's Incentive: Hot Chocolate
Here's the Randall Way video for December - https://youtu.be/y6YzGUr9fbM

Interested in volunteering at Randall or chaperoning a field trip with your student's class? - start the process by visiting the Volunteering page at MMSD’s website.