Week 5 (September 16-20)

This week, we celebrated two birthdays and those students brought in delicious treats to share.  We had cupcakes and individual trail mix "cups":

On Friday, a child brought in Munchkins from Dunkin' Donuts (just for fun), so we enjoyed those as well.  Finally, PSO delivered cinnamon bread to all the teachers:

Whew!  I need to learn some self-control or else I'll gain about 20 pounds this year!

I received a surprise in the mail early in the week--10 small boxes of Kleenex from teacherlists.com.  I had entered my school supply list on their website back in August and was sent the Kleenex as a thank you.

We learned about punctuation this week in grammar.  Our school uses the Shurley Grammar curriculum, which is scripted and can be a little dry.  I am NOT a fan of scripted curricula, so I like to add my own little flair to the program and use supplemental materials.  I am working on a fun, culminating activity to wrap up our unit on punctuation.  I'll post about it in a couple of weeks, when it takes place.  I can't wait!   

To open our unit and jog my students' memories, I read aloud Punctuation Takes a Vacation by Robin Pulver (Grades: K-5).  I love this cute little book!

In geography, we recently moved on from our map skills unit and are currently learning about landforms.  Even though we've moved on, we are still using latitude/longitude to plot active hurricanes in the Atlantic.  I invited a speaker to our class and he spoke to the 5th graders about hurricanes.  He graduated from FSU with a PhD in geography and uses statistics when studying hurricanes.  He shared with us about his experience of joining Hurricane Hunters and flying through Hurricane Isaac!  The kids loved his videos and stories!

 

The students began their landform projects this week.  I paired the children up and assigned a landform for them to research.  I assigned fjord, delta, strait, plateau, bay, glacier, and isthmus.  They had to discover what the landform is; how it is formed; a famous example and its location; the flora and fauna that is typically found on the landform; and what the weather is like on the landform.  The groups completed this project in class and I love that you can tell that a bunch of 10-11 year olds constructed the landforms:

The students will share their landform in a 2-3 minute presentation next week.  They will also point out their famous example on a map and I'll project a picture of their example so the students can see. 

The students had a great time working on this project:

Click Here to see the grade sheet for this project.