November 23 - 27

Our field trip to the Children’s Health Center is on Monday.   Thanks, Mrs. Misiewicz for chaperoning and helping with art.

No school Wed. – Fri.   Have a Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Students have started learning music for the Christmas program. Please check Mr. Zaffiro’s classpage for the words and music.

 Fifth graders have the opportunity to take part in both a school Spelling Bee (Dec.) and a Geography Bee (Jan.).  We will do some in-class practice and choose students to represent us in each.  Winners and exact dates and times will be posted when available.

Reading: We go back to the textbook now.   Our first story is “The Marble Champ”.   We’ll practice the vocabulary and the skill of identifying the steps in a process.

Language Arts: There will be no spelling lesson due to the short week. We will do a little review work from chapter 7.

Social Studies:  On Monday we’ll review for the Chapter 4 test which will be on Tuesday.   A reminder that the skill is using historical maps, and there will be no writing section.  Practice some of the on-line geography games below in preparation for the Geography Bee.

Art: We will continue work on our service project this week and next.   Please send in the items assigned for the bags.   Thanks for your help with this.

November 30 - December 4

No Mass on Tuesday.   We’ll use this time to complete our service project and fill the bags.

 Religion:  We’ll study Chapter 5, “God as Creator and Father”.   We’ll explore why we call God Father, and ways to show respect for Him and His creation.   As we learn about different types of blessings, we’ll try our hand at writing one.

Reading:  The adventure Book Report is due Wednesday, December 4.   I would like students to print out two copies.   That way one can be used in the computer lab as they pull information from it to make their brochures.

We’ll read and work on the skills from the story “The Marble Champ”, started last week; following instructions, summarizing, and multiple meanings.  At the end of the week we'll start the next story," The Paper Dragon" to be continued next week.  Remember, students will be quizzed after every two stories, so the quiz on these two stories will be the following week.

Language Arts:  We’ll review Chapter 8 on Monday.   The Test on Chapters 7 & 8 will be Tuesday. I’m skipping chapter 9, a writing section, for now and going to chapter 10.   This chapter covers action verbs, linking verbs, and direct objects

 Social Studies:    Before we continue in the text, we’ll do more of the Steps to Respect lessons.   We’ll look at situations when friends encounter problems and how they resolve them.   Next we distinguish between conflict and bullying.   Students will show understanding of the lessons with a short writing assignment.  

As we move into Chapter 5 in the text, we learn of explorers who searched for the Northwest Passage.