5th Grade Week of 11/28
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Humanities
It’s been an exciting past couple of weeks in Humanities. We are working on wrapping up our Wonder unit by writing opinion essays in response to various prompting questions. In addition, students are doing a tremendous job working on their Celebrations of Civilizations project. We are looking forward to seeing everyone Dec. 19th!
Judaics
Last week we finished our first Chumash unit. Students demonstrated their new grammar and root word skills by searching all of the text we studied and sorting the text into categories of verbs and nouns with their proper definitions. We also spoke in depth about how hatred builds and what we can do when something or someone bothers us. Students really saw how the brothers in our text kept building hate on Joseph and they were able to relate their situation to their own lives and talk about more productive ways to handle the situation.
We are now in our Israel unit. We began by exploring the meaning of “Home and Jewish Homeland”. Students thought about what a home is to them and what would motivate them to leave their home. As you are probably aware, everyone interviewed their families to find out where their family moved from and what their motivations for moving were. We dove into the history of the Land of Israel before the first major Aliyah in 1880. We learned about the Ottoman Empire and the religious Jews that made Aliyah for religious motivations. We will then act out the First Aliyah and reflect on our experience in first person diaries.
Next week on to Hanukkah!
Science
Science continues with exploring science through the lens of the scientific method. We conducted an experiment that demonstrated the connection of weight and mass. We introduced our first formula in science that weight is equal to mass times gravity. Students used interactive software to continue their exploration of how weight changes around the universe however mass stays the same. Later in science students used a handheld computer and force meter in order to discover the force of friction. They created graphs as they pulled blocks along different surface types. Their focus during the experiment was amazing and working together in small groups they produced accurate results. We cannot wait to continue exploring different science concepts within hands on experiments.
Math
Following their most recent quiz on Multiplication and Division of Whole Numbers, students had fun visiting the Hamburger Hut. There they had great practice with the four operations by adding up the checks of various customers’ tables in this diner. After we found the subtotal, we then used a tax table to add the appropriate tax, find the final total, and subtract by the cash given by the customers in order to give back the correct change.
We then went on to revisiting fractions. This included a great deal of vocabulary, such as like and unlike fractions, proper and improper fractions, mixed numbers, equivalent fractions, and prime and composite numbers. We then went onto developing procedures we need to follow in order to find the least common denominator. This week, we are adding and subtracting like and unlike fractions, before we proceed to multiplication and division. As some of this may be confusing to some students, I am once again offering my mornings before school and lunch/study hall to receive extra help.
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