The school year is flying by. Already we're feeling the cool, breezy days that tell us winter is ahead. The Resource Room students have been hard at work learning reading, writing, and math.

Our first reading unit in 5th grade is Analyzing Themes. We are reading the book Home of the Brave, a challenging but beautiful story of a boy who comes to America as a refugee from Aftica. He has experienced difficult things and is adjusting to life in a new country. We spend a lot of time discussing the story and the characters, and practice writing about our reading as well.

The 4th graders started the year with a Character reading unit. and we are reading the novel The Tiger Rising, also a challenging story with complicated characters. We have been learning about identifying character traits, as well as summarizing what we read. 

Our reading skills progress the more time we spend reading independently. Most of this work is done at home, and recorded in our reading logs. Pleaes be sure to monitor your child's home reading, and initial their log each day. It is also helpful to ask them questions about what they are reading to gauge their comprehension. "Why do you think..." questions are really good.

All of the students have been working through the writing process on our personal narratives. We generated possible writing ideas, planned our writing, drafted the story, revised, edited, and now we are ready to publish. Keep an eye out for the finished product when it comes home! It is helpful for students to get practice at home with their typing. Each student has login information for the "Typing Agent" program. This will make their life so much easier if they are proficient keyboarders!

In math, 5th graders are working on whole number place value and operations. They are exploring patterns in the base-10 place-value system and ways of representing large numbers. They use this knowledge when estimating and computing with multidigit numbers. We've learned U.S. Traditional (yes, that's the "regular" way) multiplication and partial-quotients division. We have multiplication fact quizzes most Fridays, which need to be practiced at home. Becoming fluent in basic multiplication facts will be a great benefit to the students.

The 4th graders are exploring various applicaions for multiplication. They classify shapes by properties and develop formulas for finding the area of a rectangle. They also take multiplication fact quizzes most Fridays to increase their fact fluency.