5th Grade Reading/Language Arts

• April 1: PTA Meeting, 9:30
• April 5: Kids for Christ, 8:30
• April 8: Eclipse Activities!
• April 9: Popcorn Orders Due
• April 10: Military Kids Club, 8:15
• April 18-May 1: Fifth Grade State Testing
• April 19: No School
• April 26: Call of the Wild, 9:30

Fifth graders take OSTP assessments in the spring for writing, reading, math and science. Our grade's testing dates are as follows:

• April 18: Science
• April 23-24: Math
• April 25: Writing
• April 30-May 1: Reading

You can help your child feel successful in the following ways:

• Ensure your child gets a good night's sleep.
• Provide a nutritious breakfast the mornings of testing.
• Ensure your child arrives to school on time.
• Encourage your child to work hard and do their best!

What an incredible week we had together at Camp Classen! Thank you to all of our parent chaperones who gave their time and talents to spend quality time with out students March 4-8.

Each spring, I'm so thankful I get to take some time to explore poetry with fifth graders! Elements of poetry, analyzing poems for figurative language, and comparing/contrasting poems comprised our unit. Students even crafted some of their own poems, including cinquain, haiku, diamante, blackout poetry, and more.

Some of our favorite poems included....

• "Dear Basketball" by Kobe Bryant
• "The Hill We Climb" by Amanda Gorman

We will be doing some fun review activities to prepare for state testing, as well as enjoying one more novel study together: The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley.

STAR Reading reports and 4th quarter AR goal sheets will go home after we return from Camp Classen.

AR comprises 20% of students' overall reading grades. While my foremost goal is to encourage their intrinsic love of reading, I also realize that accomplishing a tangible result is meaningful to students. We will enjoy rewards for completing quarterly goals, and I can't wait to see how their performances on STAR assessments will reflect an increase in reading level and point goals!

If your student is reading a book that is more complex and will meet more than one portion of their point goal, they will need to notify me to receive an extension at least one week before a goal is due.

• 1/4 goal due: 3/29/2024
• 1/2 goal due: 4/12/2024
• 3/4 goal due: 4/26/2024
• 100% goal due: 5/10/2024

If your students have mentioned this podcast, it's because we're loving the episodes in class! For the past several years, my students have been captivated by "Six Minutes". It's a great motivator to finish tasks so that we can turn on an episode, which are each just six minutes long. It tells a fictional story full of mystery and intrigue. A little sci-fi, some suspense, and a lot of great practice with inference and prediction. We summarize every few episodes in our notebooks. We highly recommend it!

Canvas is our learning management system for absent work, weekly agendas, and class notes.I encourage you to hop onto Canvas with your child and look around our course! On my homepage you will find buttons to click on, which will take you directly to each week's classroom activities. You'll always be in-the-know about what we're learning and what projects or tests are upcoming!

This is one of our most valuable resources in reading/language arts. We will have three sections in our notebook: reading, writing, and language. We will place in our notebooks anchor charts, notes as we learn about topics, foldables, and other important pieces of our learning! Also, all of our work with mentor sentences during grammar study and our work with Greek and Latin roots will be done here.

It is important for students to keep their notebook organized and up-to-date with each addition we put into our Table of Contents as a whole group. This will be their main resource for reference when we are working, and I will update it digitally on Canvas as well!

Click here to see a digital version of our notebook.

Email: taylorwoodard@mooreschools.com
Website: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/CLJOHH6P5NQY?ref_=wl_share