August 21, 2023

The digital planners for this week can be accessed by clicking the link below:

Boelter/Caskie AM Digital Planner (if your student start their day with Ms. Boelter in the morning): Boelter Caskie Digital Planner

Caskie/Boelter AM Digital Planner (if your student start their day with Mrs. Caskie in the morning): Caskie Boelter Digital Planner

MARK YOUR CALENDARS

Please remember that we have 5th grade grownup orientation coming up soon on August 29, 2023 at 5:00 p.m. We’d love to have you join us so you can better understand what we do in the classroom each week and how your student is progressing.

August 23, 2023 – WachDog Night

August 25, 2024 – House Leader Voting

August 29, 2023 – 5th Grade Grown Up Orientation

Last Week

Last week, we ended the week with an engineering challenge. Students were tasked with building wind cars. The task required them to evaluate a problem and come up with possible solutions to the problem by creating an engineering design. While they worked and revised, I evaluated their work and how they demonstrated understanding of the problem we created and discussed together. I’ve told them that I’ll always be evaluating which is an advantage for them. They’ll have many opportunities to prove mastery. That grade will be posted to Infinite Campus this week.

This was the wind car that ended up going the most distance in our tests with both classes. Brainstorm with your student why this specific design was so successful!

Curriculum

Next week, we’ll being our first math unit which is understanding the order of operations. We will also work on understanding how to evaluate expressions using those orders of operations. Students will continue to work on the boards and use those collaborative rubrics that we continue to revise as we master those behaviors needed to be successful at the boards. Math Workbooks will come home with your students this week. While we use problems from the workbook, we don’t use the workbooks themselves. If you would like your student to practice additional math skills at home, you can have them work on the corresponding unit in that workbook. For example, this week, we are working from Topic 13. That’s not the first topic, which is where we will go next. You can find additional work for your student in that workbook starting in Topic 13.

As we begin the unit, students will have a worked example so that they understand what our goal is for the entirety of the unit, and what demonstrating that understanding looks like. Here are our two worked examples. The first one shows that we understand the concepts and can apply them. The second example shows what mastery by the end of the year should look like. Our goal is that students will be able to self evaluate where they are on that journey and celebrate their learning growth as they progress toward that mastery.

Worked Example 1:

Worked Example #2 (Please don’t mind my poor bracket making skills :)):

In science, we’ll start our fist unit on the earth and sky. Students will gain a better of understanding of the patterns we see with our earth and extending that out to what we see in the sky.

Students will start moving between classes for a literacy Power Hour as well this week. The goal of this process is making sure each student gets direct instruction at their learning level.

I met with most students last week, but I have a few more to meet with this week. That will happen on Monday and Tuesday. Thanks so much for your continued support. I can’t wait to see how your students show growth this week!