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Harrington Handout
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
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Important Dates
9/9 PTO Back to School Picnic: 5:30 pm
9/9 5th Grade Information Session for parents: 6:00
10/4 – 10/7 NECAP testing: 3rd – 6th grades
10/8 Teacher Inservice Day: NO SCHOOL
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Community Updates
Welcome to our first regular newsletter of the year! You may expect these letters on the first day of each four- or five-day school week. I usually start the letter with general announcements before moving into the learning goals we will be working on in each academic area during the week. The weekly letter will also be posted on our class page on the school website (www.thetfordschool.org) so you can access it at any time.
We’ve gotten off to a great start in 5th grade, already settling into many routines and systems we will be using throughout the year. We’ve also been engaging in a number of community-building activities, including reflecting on individual goals for the year, and creating class murals for our bulletin boards. This week, we will be writing our class rules. We will be ratifying and posting these rules, our “Class Constitution,” at the end of the week. Also in the community-building realm, students will be sharing the contents of their “brown bags” and creating hall posters about them to be displayed in the hall next week!
Students will have a moderate amount of homework this week, assigned today and expected back to school by Friday. As I may have mentioned, the purpose of this system is to allow students to develop time management skills, and to give them some flexibility to work around existing commitments in their schedule. I encourage you to talk with your children about their plans at the beginning of the week, so that they can begin to form homework plans independently.
On a related note, this week’s homework includes our first “Family Conversation.” These assignments are intended to help your child connect the work we do in school with the world outside our classroom. These sheets are to be completed by students, even though sometimes they will be writing down what their adult partner has said, rather than their own thinking. This week’s Family Conversation asks you and your child to talk about what the homework routine should look like in your house (or at TASP) this year. Students should always complete their homework independently, but they often need some help figuring out how to accomplish such a daunting task, and this conversation is intended to help them develop that independence.
If you have any questions about this assignment, or anything to do with 5th grade, I encourage you to bring them to our parent information session this Thursday evening. This will be a time for Alison and me to outline some of our plans for the year, some general systems and expectations, as well as ideas for ways you can be most helpful to your child in 5th grade. If you are unable to attend this meeting, have no fear; we will catch you up during your beginning-of-the-year conference in the next two weeks.
Best-
Abby Harrington
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Language Arts
Our first major writing piece this year will be a personal narrative. During this week, we will be learning strategies for coming up with ideas for personal narratives, as well as some of the qualities of good writing (focus, detail, and structure) students will want to use in their pieces. Students will also be learning about ways to be productive in a writing conference.
During reading workshop this week, I will be meeting with students individually to get a sense of where they are as readers as we begin the year together. We will also be reviewing ways readers choose books, thinking about our reading lives over time, and making sure everyone knows how to complete the reading log at home and at school. At the end of the week, students will be asked to choose people they think will make good reading partners, and they will begin to work with these partners next week.
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Math
Our first unit in math is focused on multiplication, division, and reasoning about numbers. We will begin the unit by reviewing the use of arrays to identify factors and multiples of numbers, before moving on to discussing prime and square numbers. To help with this work, students will be solving number puzzles, in which they are given four clues about a given number’s properties, and have to use those clues to figure out which number(s) fit the puzzle. These are fun! Later in the week, we will break numbers down into factor pairs and trios, laying the groundwork for some prime factorization we will work on next week.
I usually send home the family letters that come from the Investigations program. For those who are interested, these should provide an explanation of the work we are doing in class, as well as ideas for ways to talk about math with your child. I will try to send these letters home with my regular family letters at the beginning of the week. If you receive this letter via email, be sure to check in the “Family” section of your child’s binder for this and other information coming from our class and the school.
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Class Pages