Welcome back to 5R!

I hope everyone enjoyed a restful and/or refreshing holiday. We spent the time in South Africa, revisiting favourite spots, and exploring new corners… If anyone’s considering a trip, we have some great tips! 🙂

First of all, many many thanks for the generous and thoughtful holiday gifts on the final day of school in December. They were (and will continue to be) delicious! I loved the contributions from across the spectrum of where we all call home, it led to a great guessing game! Thank you.

5R is lucky to have been offered two new students beginning in January. Felicia (whose family is originally Swedish and has been living in Switzerland for some time), and Truman (whose family has just moved from the USA). We’re very excited to have them join our community!

Over the coming weeks we will be launching into our Fractions unit in Math, wrapping up our Literary essays in Writing, beginning to explore Non-Fiction in Reading and transitioning from the Science of Energy, to more of a Social Studies-driven exploration of Energy’s role in the development of human civilization. As always, look for detailed descriptions of these units on the Newsfeed.

As winter is finally upon us, I highly recommend keeping a pair of snow boots and snow hat, gloves and pants at school through the coming months. We can’t really predict when we’ll have a big snowfall, but when we do, it’s great to get out in it!

Best wishes for the new term!

Jamie

Hello 5R families,

5R students seem well settled on our return from Torgon. I am sure you heard wonderful stories of the fun they had last week. They were such a pleasure to take on this trip. My favorite part of each day was gathering together with the class in the evening to hear the highlights of their day and to read a story to them.

First off, unfortunately we have a case of head lice in fifth grade. Please follow this link for details on how to search for and treat this.

This week we’ll spend some time reflecting on the Torgon trip. During writing workshop, the students will write a short narrative about one memorable time in Torgon. Then, we’ll wrap up the open-genre unit by editing and publishing the work the students have been doing. Later this week, we’ll launch our Personal Narrative unit.

We’ll wrap up our volume unit in math. This week, the kids will build 3-D robots out of blocks and measure the volume of these robots. This project will serve as the unit assessment, and will soon come home in their assessment folders for you to celebrate with them.

In our unit time, we will continue to explore the idea of community membership and delve into our rights, responsibilities, and spheres of influence as members of various communities.

PHOTOS!

Individual photos will be Thursday afternoon.  Class photos will be taken on Friday. As Tuesday is a PE day, if you’d like your child’s photo to be in different clothing, please send them in their PE clothes as usual, but send along a change for afterwards.

Lastly, this coming weekend will be the third instalment of Zurich’s fantastic Maker Faire. ZIS will be well featured, with several G5 students sharing their work, as well as talks and workshops from various members of the ZIS community. This is a very student-friendly event and would make a great day out! Some workshops are pre-registration based, and others are walk-ins. If you’ve the time to come on out, it will be a great day!

Learning Update

This week, students have drafted their first informational piece about energy!  They’ve been researching, reading nonfiction texts, and taking notes. They will use this research to revise their informational reports. During unit time, students have been creating demonstrations and performing experiments about energy. Then, they have explained how energy is transferred and/or transformed during these experiments. Most students have completed making videos of these and posting them to their blogs.

During math time, we’re learning about fractions.  This week we’re comparing and ordering fractions.  Next week we will find equivalent fractions in order to add and subtract.  If you would like to work with your child at home, there are some fractions games and practice on the Netvibes page.

Field Trip to Umwelt Arena

Tomorrow, on Thursday, as announced last week on the newsfeed, the students will visit Umwelt Arena, an environmental museum, in Spreitenbach. Students should bring a lunch with them that day. The cafeteria will provide packed lunches for students who normally order cafeteria lunch. We will depart the school at 9:00 and return by 3:00, so students do not need to arrive early or be picked up late.

Welcome back from break! We had a great first 3 days back last week, kicking off new units in reading, writing, and inquiry. Here’s an update of what we’re learning and doing in class:

Literacy:

In reading we have begun a unit on nonfiction reading skills. We will focus on skills that will help us as we read increasingly complex nonfiction texts. For the first few weeks, all students will be reading texts that support our unit on energy. Students can choose between nonfiction and fiction books for home reading.

In writing, we are wrapping up our unit on narrative. Students have written many seed ideas, and learned strategies for generating story ideas. They then chose a personally powerful seed to draft and evolve. Most students have reached the stage of having a “Frankenstein story”, built of bits and pieces of multiple drafts and revisions. We celebrated this work by sharing it with our class and our grade one buddies before the break. Next, we will begin a unit on research reports. During that unit, students will write reports on energy — first an “all about energy” report, and then later, researching one particular source of energy and the impact of our energy use on the environment.

Math:

Students will learn about division this week. They will learn a few ways to model division and the partial quotients algorithm. This algorithm builds conceptual understanding of division. Please ask your child to show you how to divide this way sometime later in the week. Toward the end of the week, students will be assessed on their understanding of the four operations. Our next unit (on fractions) will begin next week.

Unit:

Last week, we kicked off our energy unit. Each child visited four different classrooms to see four different energy demonstrations. The kids got really excited about these. It was a lot of fun for all of us. This week, we will begin learning about the different types of energy. On Thursday, students will make their own energy demonstrations.

On Friday, we celebrated our community and our first week back with a team-building hike upstream, and up the “waterfalls” in the woods. Thank you for sending in rain boots and jackets… It got wet 🙂 Enjoy a few photos of the event.

Dear 5R Families,

We’ve had a lot of assessments completed recently! On Friday your child will be bringing home three assessments:

1. The completed rubric for their most recent Genius Hour inquiry, which includes self-assessment by students, as well as teacher assessment on the same document.
2. Decimals assessment. As our decimals unit in Math is winding up, students will bring this assessment, along with their reflection document and a checklist of understandings.
3. Research-based opinion essays and a checklist of writing progress. These essays, which were shared along with the student-completed checklists during our writing celebration several weeks ago. They will be accompanied by a publication package that includes the final essay and documents that your child feels help tell the story of this writing experience.

All of these are to be shared with you, in conversation with your child, and returned to school by the end of next week, Thursday, March 9. Please sign the assessment documents and, if you require more time to share, please let me know.

As with previous assessments, they are bringing these home so that you may have a better understanding of their thinking and progress.

These assessments should be understood as being a snapshot of student understanding on a particular day at a particular time, in a particular way of demonstrating thinking. This particular way of assessing understanding may present an incomplete picture of student progress. It is for this reason that many forward-thinking institutions have moved away from written assessments as the sole way of testing and grading. ZIS is no exception and these assessments represent only one of several ways data on a student’s thinking is collected.

These assessments are being sent home primarily to enrich your conversations with your child about their thinking and learning. Please take the time to look at them with your child, alongside their reflection. Then, sign them (somewhere obvious) and return them promptly to school. I would appreciate them returned by next Thursday, March 9. If you require more time, please let me know.

Many thanks for your ongoing support of your child’s home away from home!

Warm regards,

Jamie