Santa's busy elves

  

Health lessons

5th graders have been coming to our classroom to talk to us about health and nutrition.  Students are learning about healthy snack options, natural sugars and making good brain food choices.  


  

Keep that grinch away activities

We read the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, sang songs from the movie, brainstormed adjectives that described the Grinch, made our own Grinch dust to spread at home.  Fingers crossed that it worked...

         

STEM games

What a blast!  The STEM games were a huge hit.  We shared our games with our classmates, Mrs. Johnson's class and Mrs. Sorenson's class.  

                     

Hieroglyphics

Students are learning about early civilization in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.  Be sure to ask your child why is writing important to civilizations and what types of writing did these civilizations use?  Last week we explored cuneiform and wrote our initials in those symbols. This was very challenging for students as the symbols are extremely detailed.  This week we explored Hieroglyphics from Ancient Egypt and we wrote our names in Hieroglyphics 


  

This student practiced on the snow day at home

Outdoor fun

     

Making subtraction story problems

Students love creating story problems to challenge their math partners with.  Students 
visualize a problem, write the words and ask their partner to solve it using pictures, equations and labels.  You can reinforce the fun of story problems by doing the orally in the car.  Students love to solve them and share their thinking on how they solved them.  When the students tell you their answer instead of saying, "yes, good job" try "how do you know or how did you solve that?"  I ask these questions after students give answers right or wrong.  They do not need me to validate their thinking but rather review their thinking, check to see if it made sense and revise if necessary or say, I am write and my evidence is....

We are working to create problem solvers and thinkers who provide evidence for their thinking.  Math is just like reading, the answers to the problems have to make sense just like the unknown words in sentences have to make sense when solving.