ELA... Third Trimester is upon us and we have started our third novel of the year! We are reading a historical fiction book, Letters from Rifka, by Karen Hesse. This is a story of twelve-year-old Rifka's, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, journey to America. The book is written in first-person through a series of letters. The students are learning about her internal and external conflicts that she faces along her journey. Students are tying many reading skills that we have learned throughout the year into this book. They are plotting their own story structure, developing a sequence of conflict/resolutions throughout the book, analyzing figurative language, as well as making inferences based on what is written in the letters. We are also mapping her journey across Europe to America. In Writing, students have begun to write argument essays and will continue to throughout this trimester.
Students have been hard at work developing visual models of rational numbers to build a deeper understanding of the relationship among fractions, decimals, and percents.
They have also been working in groups to complete STEM projects. This week, in honor of March Madness (GO GAMECOCKS!!), teams were challenged to build a catapult that would shoot a ping pong ball into a goal. Students designed and built the shooter and the hoop/goal to have the ball go through. Students have completed this task and will now begin testing their designs and recording their results of "makes" and "misses" on line plots. They will measure the distance of the catapult from the hoop and begin perfecting their aiming skills through angles and arcs.
Social Studies: This trimester our focus has been on how the U.S. was able to pull itself out of the Great Depression thanks to WWII. We have spent time learning about how Germany began to take over other lands, despite the Treaty of Versailles, and how ultimately the U.S. was forced into battle. Through our studies, students have discovered how resiliant our country is when faced with adversity.
We are all looking forward to our D.C. trip and having the history that we have been learning about all year come to life!
In Science, we have been exploring matter, mixtures, and the changes that can occur with these substances. Students designed many different experiments to explore states of matter, mixtures, and solutions. We learned about factors that can effect the solubility of substances with an inquiry lab. We also explored various methods to separate a mixture and students were able to separate a variety of mixtures using different techniques.
Finally, students explored the process of distillation to create fresh drinking water. They designed a device that could use the sun's energy to create freshwater from saltwater. We are now in the process of collecting data and seeing how much freshwater we are able to capture from our devices!
We can't believe the third trimester is already here! With less than 12 weeks to go in 5th grade, students are eagerly anticipating our trip to DC in just over a week!