What's Coming Up and What We've Been Up To!

First of all, here are all our important dates coming up. More to come in the way of permission slips and timelines before we leave for Spring Break:

• March 28th--Last Day before Spring Break
• April 9th--Class Resumes and our class pets arrive 🐸🦀
• April 11th--MStep testing begins
• April 27th--Field Trip to Impression Five Museum (permission slips to come home this week)
• May 24th--Coffee House Author Celebration (This will be all afternoon. Flyer to come home this week)
• June 4th--5th Grade Greenfield Village/Henry Ford Museum Field Trip
• June 5th--Last Day of School

M Step Two days after we arrive back from spring break we will begin the MStep and our goal is to keep a healthy perspective on testing here in fifth grade. There are many things we teach that are not easy to measure on a test. Having said that, the academic learning we've done this year has been significant. We are so proud of what we know. When the testing time comes, we want to see it for what it's worth--One measure. One day. Not the most important thing, but very important nonetheless. Data is the only information some may ever have about what happened this year in our classroom. We know we have done good and authentic learning in here, and so we want to make this data as good and authentic as we can. That is why we try our best on the tests we take, and take them very seriously indeed.

We certainly don't want anxiety to take over. The motto is, "Keep calm, and simply show what you can do." There are a few things families can be extra mindful of to prepare students to do their best and feel good on test day.

• Get a good night's sleep
• Eat breakfast, preferably including some kind of protein. :-)
• Get up early so the morning routine isn't rushed and stressful.
• Bring a healthy snack to school (fresh fruit/veggies or cheese sticks/yogurt)
• I'd like to make sure everyone has a snack on testing days. If you would be interested in sending a healthy snack to school for sharing, please let me know! 

Thank you so much for your support in this. 

Here are just a few of the happenings in our classroom this winter. Enjoy pics and video. :-)

Colony Billboards and sales presentations.

Readers talk about books.

Learning about motion.

We like to move while we learn as much as we can.

We pride ourselves on good discussions.

Abram's Planetarium on Valentine's Day <3

November: Fall Back, Look Ahead :-)

We've been busy in room 401! Here are some highlights from October, and reminders of upcoming dates:

Peter Pan at the High School: Wednesday, November 8th
Wonder at Regal Cinema:       Friday, November 17th
Parent Teacher Conferences:  November 14th, 16th and 17th
Report cards will be given to parents at your conference.

5th grade writers have almost (finally!) finished a narrative unit.  We also wrapped up a persuasive letter project as part of our chapter three in our Social Studies Text: Native American Cultural Regions.

In Science we're at the tail end of our "Objects in the Sky" kit. We now consider ourselves something of experts on moon phases, eclipses, seasons and why we have them, and tides. Our hands-on science is a favorite with the students.

Our Forty Book Challenge continues Your child's teacher is only on book SIX, which puts me a little behind, and I'm sure some of the students feel the same way. We have busy lives! There is, however, Thanksgiving break coming up, AND Christmas break after that. I have faith in us. We will make it. How can you support your child? Read a book to them, even though they can read themselves. Recollections of my mother reading Nancy Drew mysteries to me, long after I could read on my own, remain some of my most cherished childhood memories. Take your child to the library, the used bookstore, Barnes and Noble, shop for books on Amazon.

Kids: There are two important factors that make someone successful in this reading challenge: Read only books that you enjoy--DON'T waste time on books that don't interest you. Those take a LOT longer to read, if you finish them at all. MOVE ON to something you like. AND have a book wherever you are. Read in the EDGES of your life. It all adds up. Truly.

In Math we are wrapping up Unit 2 and will have an assessment before conferences. I'll be able to show those to you when we meet. The concepts we've been studying are multiplication and division. The method I've been focusing on is the Partial Quotient strategy. If students know the traditional algorithm and want to use that instead I'm okay with it. But I want them to understand how partial quotients work so that they can demonstrate that they thoroughly comprehend this mathematical structure.

Here are some photo highlights from October. Enjoy!

scientists at work

science fun!

Buddies with Mrs. Ellis' class

More buddies

Shared books make friends. :-)

Falling Into October. . . .

We've had a wonderful first whole month of school, with your children doing a fabulous job adjusting to fifth grade learning routines. Here is a rundown of what's been cooking in room 401:

Hurricane relief
We contributed 100 dollars to Hurricane Harvey victims in Texas. Cryar Intermediate school in Conroe, Texas will use this money to replenish much needed school supplies for those students. Twenty-five dollars went toward the school-wide Hurricane Irma relief through the Red Cross. Thank you so much for your generous donations.

My MSU Research Study
Look for two copies of a photo/student work release to come home this week. One copy is for you to sign if you give permission for me to use your student's work in presentations I do about our fifth grade writing instruction. The other copy is for your records. As a National Writing Project Fellow I have an opportunity to participate in work that aims to improve the engagement level and the quality of student writing. The current study focuses on a process to approach "undiscovered genres." Ask your child about it! More details are in the letter coming to you.

Literacy Assessment
We are on a three week rotation, with vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension strategies being assessed for a "grade," respectively on a rotating cycle. Students are held accountable in other ways (they must show evidence of spelling edits in their writing, for example, ALWAYS. Ask them to show you the strategy they have been taught for doing this.)
Here are the dates for specific literacy assessments for the month of October:

Oct. 6th--vocabulary quiz (on that week's vocabulary list)
Oct. 13th--spelling proofreading passage assessment (using that week's spelling words)
Oct. 20th--comprehension skill exit ticket (they cannot study for this, other than to be practicing the strategy focus in our reading for that week as they always do, in multiple contexts.
Oct. 27th--vocabulary quiz

The assessment cycle will rotate this way, mostly, for the rest of the school year.

Some Thoughts on Spelling Assessment

Students will have the spelling words copied in their planner. We do word study every week, with a focus on Greek and Latin roots. Also, I am reinforcing the spelling strategies students use in the real world by having them practice looking at words to see if they "look" right, and then fixing them up until they do. They don't only do this on assessment day. They are practicing this all the time. The reason specific words are not assessed every week is because there is overwhelming research to support the notion that focusing on the memorization of specific words only teaches children how to memorize words for one week, and they are very likely to forget them the next. The focus in our classroom is on spelling practice with instant teacher feedback (on their whiteboards). This is part of our word study. We want students learning strategies to fix their own spelling, reading voraciously to get exposed to correctly spelled words. We also want them to write voraciously (and edit with spelling in mind, always) to practice. If you're interested in a short article about the merits of word study over rote memorization click here. :-)

Math Games

A Call For Expo Markers
Because we use our whiteboards (slates) often in math and literacy, we go through a lot of those skinny Expo markers. If you see them on sale and want to send some our way throughout the year we so appreciate it! I pick them up as well when I see them marked down. Thank you so much.

Friday Folders
Please make sure your child brings their Friday Folder back to school on Mondays!

Homework
We will resume our normal Everyday Math Homelink plan (three to four homelinks per week, checked in on Mondays) as our next math intervention won't begin for a while. I'll let you know about any changes, and in the meantime you may check your child's Monday planner entry for the homelinks to be done for that week.

Forty Book Challenge!
Last week the students brought home a flyer about our 5th grade wide 40 book challenge. This works out to them reading roughly one book per week throughout the school year. If you haven't seen this there is a link to the document with all the details here. Consider doing the challenge with your child! Families who read together stick together!

As always, please contact me with any questions you have. Here are some pictures from the past month:

Buddies

Some Book Buddy Pictures. Mrs. Ellis' class is our Buddy class this year!

Buddies

Immersing ourselves in the genre of author blurbs.

Our Life in Pictures (and video): August

Greetings Fifth Grade Families😊

Welcome to Team Van Hoesen! This year has already proven to be pretty wonderful. Your children have everything to do with that and I feel extremely fortunate to be their teacher. Here you will find mostly pictures of the goings-on in our classroom. I'm going to try to put most of the content area updates right in Powerschool. Next week I will send Powerschool Passwords and User Names for parents home with the students. There are no grades posted yet, just information about what we've been doing in language arts, science, social studies, and math.

Speaking of math, ask your child about the cool Inspirational Math we've been starting our year with. It truly does inspire the mind. Today we learned all about Pascal's triangle and the patterns therein. We are building a tight-knit writerly community already with a lot of fluency building and idea generation. The writer's notebooks coming in have been just wonderful. In Social Studies we've started our first unit which is a geographical overview of the United States. Soon we will begin to tell the story of the birth of our country--full of drama and intrigue! Our first Science unit is about objects in the sky, and we've started by taking a look at how seasons are controlled by the tilt of the earth and its position relative to the sun. Through it all we read and write and get to know each other just a little better every day. Enjoy!

Personalizing our writer's notebooks.