Hello 5B families! I've got a nice long update for you this week! And a TON of photos! A few announcements:
Home of the Brave This week we finished Home of the Brave. The class agreed that finishing the book was very bittersweet. Their responses to me in their Reader's Notebooks have been overwhelmingly positive, and they all agree that we should continue reading this book with future fifth grade classes. Every time I read this book I find more and more parts that I love, new ways of looking at the world, or a piece of figurative language that I missed. Here are a few excerpts of what they wrote about Home of the Brave:
We now have a few copies of two other novels about Sudanese refugees, A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park and The Red Pencil (also written in poetry!) by Andrea Davis Pinkney. A number of kids have borrowed these, and they are making their way around the class, so keep an eye out for them at home. We also are working with Ms. Bookstein's class on posters representing the 5 proverbs that begin each section of the book. They worked in groups of 5 or 6, and each group had 1 proverb which they had to represent 3 different ways. Each group made 3 posters, 1 explaining and showing the literal meaning of the proverb, 1 explaining and showing the meaning of the proverb as it relates to the book, and 1 on the message we can glean from the proverb. The proverbs are: When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. You only make a bridge when there is a river. One doesn't forego sleep because of the possibility of nightmares. When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. A sandstorm passes; the stars remain. You can see photos of their progress below, first discussing and planning, then sketching and finally adding color. They will present their posters on Monday. Found Poetry Ms. Bookstein taught me about Found Poetry and we tried it in our class. It was a big hit! Basically, each child gets a piece of paper with one page from a book (it can also be done with magazine articles). They read over the page and look for what words pop out at them. Then they circle those words and create a poem out of just a few words that are on the page. Below you can see some photos of how they started off with the circling of words, and then how they decorated their poems. They really enjoyed this activity, and will get to repeat it with their Grandfriends next week! Creative Writing On Tuesday we joined Ms. Randenberg and her class for a creative writing activity. Ms. Randenberg showed an image for 1 minute and students had to write down as much as they could remember about the image. Students shared what they remembered and it was cool to see what different brains remembered. After discussing the image, everyone got to write a story, using the image as inspiration. We haven't done as much creative writing recently, so it was a really nice addition. The class said they really enjoyed this activity and are looking forward to doing it again next week. Learning and Teaching We are beginning a new activity in Morning Meeting as we conclude the year (already!?!). Each student is going to have a chance to teach the class how to do something. I started off by teaching the class how to draw an elephant...from the back :) Then Jocelyn taught us how to make origami paper boats. They can stand up on their own! I can already tell that soon our class is going to be decorated in little origami boats! 50/50 Day As a school school community we have been discussing 50/50 day and what we can do to make our world more equal across genders. We discussed this in the context of math, as we looked at a variety of statistics. We looked at percentages of men and women in professions. We also looked at countries that have more women than men. During our discussion, women in politics around the world also came up. Our Congress is about 80% male, but our country is only 50% male. However, there are some countries whose governments show much more equality, with Rwanda being the most diverse in terms of gender. Below are the articles and the video that we looked at. Video from Let It Ripple about what it would be like if men and women were represented more equally Article comparing men and women in a variety of professions. The class definitely picked up on the patterns of more women in lower paying jobs and more men in higher paying jobs, as well as a higher percentage of men in positions of more power. Article on men and women in government around the world. Article about 10 countries where women outnumber men. This was also a nice introduction to percents, and we connected it to our current unit on ratios by finding equivalent ratios and simplifying them to create a reduced ratio. For example, if 81% of Congress is men, then 19% of Congress is women. We can round this to 80% and 20%, and say that in Congress there is a ratio of 80 men for every 20 women, which can be reduced to 8 men to 2 women, or 4 men to 1 woman, 4:1. The class overall agreed that this was unfair. We can do better! On Thursday we had a presentation by biology students in Isabelle's dad's class. The 5th grade was lucky enough to learn about several topics in immunology, focusing on animals. We learned about why frogs are dying and how to help them, why the flu shot is important, why there are more ticks after a warm winter, why bees are dying and how to help them, why sleep is important, and why polar bears are dying. The presenters were a little nervous to present to fifth graders, but everyone (fifth graders included!) did great :) I hope you all have a great weekend!
Best, Rebecca Comments are closed.
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