Week ending May 1, 2020

Hi Fifth Graders, Families, and Guests,

I have streamlined the Remote Learning document a bit to make things easier for students to navigate. They should do each item from the top of the chart…

and choose three of the five subjects to do each day from the bottom tier:

There are 15 choices (Library is a complement to Reading), so three a day for 5 days will mean students will get a chance to do every activity throughout the week.

Google Classroom has more detailed descriptions of the assignments and links to the read aloud videos.

Thanks!

 

P. S. The photos below do not show mad scientists, werewolves, or other mythological creatures. Rather they show healthy fifth graders at play!

Specials

Hi Everyone,

I am linking a short video of an Earth Day visitor to my house!

I wanted to remind you all that part of your work each week should be to visit the Specialist teachers’ websites to see what they  are recommending. You might do Art and Music on Mondays and Tuesdays, PE and Technology on Wednesdays and Fridays and Library on Thursdays. Ms Rivers is building the school website so she recommends that you read something interesting during reading time, maybe from one of the links she has provided.

Pick from the Specialist Choices below.

Art: Ms. Neal

Library:  Ms. Rivers

All School resources

Music: Ms. Renauld

PE:  Coach Sadie

Technology: Mr. Mwangi

Happy Earth Day!

Welcome to the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day! There are activities and options for students on the following links:

Earth Day 2020 Choice Board

Earth Week Options and Activities

We will be meeting Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 11:00-12:00 in three small groups. Keep a lookout for an email about times and meeting nicknames. There will be a notice in Google Classroom about the meetings too.

As always, the most up to date Remote Learning plan may be found here.

We just learned today that schools in Massachusetts will be closed until the fall. I miss all of you and look forward to seeing you at our morning meetings twice a week.

I have added a read aloud series of videos on Google Classroom too. You could watch one each day (perhaps while having a snack, as if we were at school!) or all at once, whichever you prefer. There are questions about the reading in the same assignment in GC. I miss reading to you live, but I guess I have become a YouTuber now(!?!).

LES Remote Learning Plan, Grade 5

Click here to see what Fifth Graders have been working on this week: Link to Updated Document

It was really great to see so many fifth graders in the Google Meets we had this week! I’m also really enjoying reading all the fiction stories and poetry you are submitting! It was fun to see animations, stop motion videos and photos of wildlife that you submitted too! These are strange times for school but that does not mean fifth graders are not hard at work discovering more about the world through exploration, science, books, and online platforms!

I will plan to meet with small groups again next week, Tuesday and Thursday between 11:00 and 12:00. Look for an email and a Google Classroom post about the time your group will meet. We will use the same nickname to log in as we did last week but I will send a reminder through Google Classroom.

Here are a few photos from when we were all together this spring! Miss you all!

Mr. S

 

The Most Important Thing

Dear Fifth Grade Families,

As we move toward more active remote learning, I want to make clear that I have a renewed perspective after speaking with so many of you on the phone. So many of you have started meaningful projects with students and created schedules that work for your lives in these times of unprecedented change. My job as the teacher of your children is to provide them with opportunities to learn. I will also provide them with materials to review and pursue so that they continue to stay engaged and connected with their learning.

This will not be an easy task for me or for families. One of the things I am able to do as a teacher is to differentiate instruction in order to challenge each child appropriately. I am experienced with differentiating in person but much less experienced doing so virtually. In class, I modify questions in discussions and comments to written work. I assign different material or modify expectations about how much will be accomplished. I create challenges and extensions and I make sure there are opportunities for review. I am good at doing those things when I am with students in person but I am not sure how well I will be able to do it remotely.

Therefore, some students may feel overwhelmed and others may feel like they are not being challenged enough. I am developing more open ended projects in order to allow students to do what they can and to rise as high as they can. However, I will not be there to guide, assist, and modify, so I ask you for your help. Please keep lines of communication open and let me know what you and your child need. Everyone’s access to academic time, electronically connected devices, the internet, and parent support is different. I want to acknowledge that this transition will be bumpy and know that everyone is making a good faith effort to do what they can.

It’s also my job to provide families with a meaningful home/school connection. I trust that parents and children are doing what they can while trying to support one another and their families. We all need to stay connected and keep our heads above water. I miss being in the classroom and seeing all the children each day, and I know they miss me and one another.

Very truly yours,

-Bill Stewart

Spelling Returning this week

I have posted a link for each of the students who participates in a spelling group in Google Classroom. Each of the four groups has its own list of words that are a continuation of the work we were doing in class before the school closure. Spelling should take roughly 10-20 minutes per day, M-F. I will update with a new list of words each week for each group.

The directions are part of the assignment in Google Classroom, but I will also put them on the blog in the space below:

 

If it works with your academic schedule, each day of the week your child should try to do a different activity to ensure that these words and the spelling principles they represent are mastered.  Parents can assist with the blind sort and the spelling pretest (Tue./Thu.) in particular, but all students will benefit from discussing and describing the categories of their spelling sorts and from brainstorming with others, so there are ample opportunities  for parents to lend a hand. The directions below are for the students to follow:
Monday: Sort the words into categories like the ones we did in class. Read each   word aloud during this activity.  Be ready to explain why the words are sorted in a particular way; What does the sort reveal about spelling in  general?  Sort the words a second time. (The sort may be written out.)
Tuesday: Do a blind or no peeking sort with a partner.  Lay down a word from
each category as a header and then have your partner read the rest of the words aloud.
You must indicate where each word goes without seeing it and spell each word out loud (or in writing).  If you make an error, put that word  back in the mix and try sorting and spelling it again.
Wednesday: Do a spelling Word Hunt,  looking for patterns in a familiar book or dictionary (no computer assist, please) that have the same pattern.  Alternately, Brainstorm to find rhyming words or other words that fit the pattern. Try to find about 2-5 more words for each category (about 10-12 total).  Variation: students may define and write the part of speech for 5 unfamiliar words, then use those words in sentences.
Thursday Do a written Pretest to prepare for Friday’s spelling test. As your partner calls out the words in a random order, you should write them in their categories.  Try any word you misspell a second or even a third time.
Friday Do a Spelling Test of 10 words, some from each category. Include words you have that you may have misspelled on the pretest or while doing sorts earlier in the week. You could take a photo of your spelling test or report the score to me via email.

Class Play ideas

I am including a link to a video I made about some of our class play work and one idea we had for developing a story into a play. We did a lot of work with John Porcino on this project and devoted class reading, writing and science time to the creation of a story.

I made the video as part of a National Geographic teacher program and I had to ensure no recognizable student faces were visible. That works for a class blog as well! I added a link to the video in Google Classroom, but this link should take everyone to Vimeo, where you can see the video in its entirety.

National Geographic live stream events

National Geographics Explorer Classroom offers live streamed youtube science explorations at 2:00.

4/1 @ 2:00PM Eastern | Diego Pol: Dinosaur Discovery
4/2 @ 1:00PM Eastern | Terry Virts: Looking Back at Earth
4/2 @ 2:00PM Eastern | Estefania Roldan Nicolau: Life on the Edge
4/3 @ 2:00PM Eastern | Jeffrey Marlow: Most Extreme Microbes
4/6 @ 2:00PM Eastern | M Jackson: Thin Ice
4/7 @ 9:00AM Eastern | Nirupa Rao: Illustrating Nature
4/7 @ 2:00PM Eastern | Edward Hurme: Tracking Bats
4/8 @ 2:00PM Eastern | Asha Stuart: Documentary Photography
4/9 @ 2:00PM Eastern | Enric Sala: Pristine Seas
4/20 @ 11:00AM Eastern | Andrej Gajic: Protecting Sharks

+ more events coming soon!

Learn more about National Geographic Explorer Classroom at natgeoed.org/explorerclassroom

Please Note: Explorer Classroom events are live events hosted on YouTube. They are open to the public and recorded. Please share these terms with parents of students who will participate live on camera. If any parents or students prefer not to be on camera, please accommodate their wishes.

For registration purposes, we ask that students under 13, please have an adult register your household. The Services NGS provides are not intended for visits from children under the age of 13, or under the age of 16 in the case of children in the European Economic Area (EEA), and we do not knowingly permit children under these ages to register for any content, product or Service.

Spring Additions

Sadly, it seems increasingly likely that our school closure will mean that we will not have the chance to build a fifth grade play this year.

I will be posting lessons on Google Classroom in each subject area. There will be online and offline suggestions for each subject.  I encourage you all to visit the school website, which will have many resources for families as well as links to the pages created by Art, music, Physical Education, Library and Technology teachers.

My most recent email for families follows…

Dear Fifth Grade Families,
Next week we will be moving to more formal remote learning. The school webpage will have lots of useful links and will connect you with specialist teachers and their ideas and resources. My class blog will direct you to Google Classroom, where I will have most of the material I will present. In this email I am going to try to break things down by subject and give both on-line and off-line options for students.  The expectation is that we will move to a half day of school work for each student (3 to 3.5 hours). The times in parentheses are recommendations for each subject M-F. My goal is that students feel connected to one another, to teachers, and to the learning they are doing. I hope they feel like they have achieved something and are proud to share it. When and if they are ready, I will share what they have done with their peers.
I hope you are all doing well. It was good to talk with (almost) all of you in the past couple of days!
 
Yours truly,
 
Bill Stewart
 
Reading (40-60 minutes):
Off-line:
Read an independent book (30 minutes daily). Talk about it with someone at home or remotely.
 On-line:  Record your thoughts about the book you are reading on the shared student reading page.
-Do Lexia (20 minutes)
-Read a book on Epic! (could be part of 30 minutes of reading)
Read the NEWSELA article about cats. Take the quiz and respond to the writing prompt. Highlight unfamiliar words in red.
Writing (20-30 minutes daily)
On-line: There are 8 lessons in the writing prompts site. So far 6 students have submitted pieces to me for revision and edits. One has published. There are lots of good ideas here.
-work on the class play idea. (Google Classroom)
-write a narrative using the story starters in Google Classroom
Off-line: write a fiction story. Prompt: tell a creation myth about the endangered species that you wrote about and one of their interesting features or behaviors.
Math (30-40 minutes daily):
Off-line: Play Spend and Save with someone. I am attaching the directions. You will need playing cards (A-9, Ace= 1, no face cards unless you want Queens to represent zeroes) and coins. Scrap paper helps. You start with $100. Heads you spend, tails you save. Three cards make the amount. You choose the order of the digits.
Review basic facts with cards (2-people): try addition and multiplication, first to correctly say the sum or product gets the cards.  (adults and older siblings can slow themselves by having to write the solution or something similar)
Online:  Xtra Math, Symphony Math, Prodigy Math and/or Khan Academy
​Science (30 minutes): 
Off-line: take a walk and see what types of animal and plant life you can find. This is an exciting time of year for life sciences. Ponds are filled with eggs and amphibians calling out for mates. Birds are migrating and nesting. Plants are blooming (what are the first buds producing? Flowers or leaves?) Many animals have come out of hibernation. What signs can you see?  I saw moose and deer antlers that were just shed and lots of tracks. Keep your eyes peeled!  Share your observations with whoever you are with. Add to the signs of spring page.
On-line: signs of spring page, plant observation, Mystery Science videos and experiments, plus:
National Geographic has new streaming video feeds at 2:00 every weekday! Check them out here.
Social Studies (20-30 minutes):
Off-line: What can you find out about current events? The school closures and changes we are making in terms of physical distancing are unprecedented in the memory of almost everyone in this country.  What are people saying and doing? How have the changes affected you in positive ways? What has been the most challenging for you and your family? Keep a journal or let me know what is happening through email or Google Docs (share with me).
On-line: There are links in Google Classroom to world geography sites. We will be taking a deeper dive into World Geography in the coming weeks.
-Scholastic has made all of their pages available to students. We are in Week 2 of their offerings on-line
Choose your Own: Off-line or On-line (20-30 minutes):
Send me what you’ve been working on at home and I will try and share it with the rest of the fifth grade class. I have really enjoyed seeing your projects and would like to invite you to give one another positive feedback.  There is a document for feedback.
This is an opportunity to learn whatever you want and share it with the class. You could include a video of yourself learning to count in another language, how to juggle pins, learning to write in calligraphy, or training your pet to do a trick. The options are limitless!
The links are the first item in Google Classroom at the top of the Classwork page.