Classwork: Feb. 22

Food and Nutrition Wrap Up.
1) Student Complete Human Body Packet
2) Students Finish Group Posters showing a system (including a paragraph description of one organ)
3) Opinion Letter: analyze 3 food items from a restaurant and write a formal letter stating your opinion about how healthy those food items are.
4) Test
5) Sugar Test: which cereals have the most sugar?  (please send in 1/2 cup of cereal)

Writing: VOICE WORK
We are learning about voice and including some ways to improve our writing:

• use vivid verbs
• add adjectives or adverbs (or take them out)
• use figurative language
• add description that engages that sense

 Math: wrap up of fraction unit
Post-assessment coming soon.

Assignments: February 8th

We are working big time on Food and Nutrition Unit.

We are making human body posters in teams.
We are researching what it takes to make a well balanced meal so that we can a) plan a menu for a day's worth of meals; b) analyze nutritional information from a restaurant in order to write an opinion letter about whether or not their food is any good.

We are plugging away at fractions.
This week we are making maps of a 30km river with landmarks at half-way, quarters, fifths, sixth, fifths and twelfths.  In addition, we are working on renaming fractions, converting improper fractions to mixed numbers (and back) and more.

Big news, on Thursday, we are doing our second of our two water quality field trips. 

Optionally, if your kid (probably 5th graders) wants to go to the South Sound GREEN Congress, they have an essay to write: "Why is clean water important?"

Classwork: week of Feb. 1

I have changed a few things, due to a class meeting discussion about work.

First of all, the students said that due dates were stressing kids out too much.  So, we are just working on things until they are done.  Kids who finish early with all their work will do learning contracts to extend their learning in content related fields.

Second, we aren't doing math groups by grade level any more.  There was too much of a mix up.  Instead, we are all working on the best problems from the fourth and fifth grade curriculum.  I am giving daily lessons (number talks and problem strings) and then we follow up with some problems on related content.

This week, we are starting the Food and Nutrition unit:

•  reading Food and Nutrition: take notes using the "Nutrient Table"
• label and color diagrams of the human body systems
• bring in three (or more) food labels containing ingredients and nutrition information.

 Please refer to the page on the entire unit:

http://mrshomework.blogspot.com/p/food-and-nutrition.html