This week, our fifth grade class has begun their first novel study. We are focusing on the genre of realistic fiction, which means the story is made up, but contains characters and events that could happen in real life. We use these books to review the skills covered so far in fifth grade, as well as to reintroduce a few skills that should be familiar from 4th grade. It is important that as your child works through the novels, they are monitoring their own comprehension. This means that as they read, they should be recording any words they do know how, or any parts in the story they found confusing. Then, they should go back and reread that section, and use what we call "fix up"strategies to help them understand. These strategies include using the context of the sentence, as well as reading before and after the sections to see if there are any clues to help. As a parent, one thing you can do is ask your child to summarize what they are reading. Be careful, though! Make sure they are summarizing and not retelling. What is the difference? Retelling is when they include specific events and details from the story. Summarizing is when they only tell the main idea of what is happening. For example, a summary of the story of the Three Little Pigs may read something like this: Three pigs build their own houses, but a mean wolf destroys two of the houses. As you can see, very few details are given, but you get the idea of what the story is about. I hope your child enjoys the novel study as much as we look forward to teaching it!
Curriculum Updates:
Reading: Realistic fiction novel study continues. We are working on summarizing, drawing conclusions, story structure, visualization, and figurative language. We are also defining important vocabulary words from each chapter.
Math: We have finally finished our division chapter. Didn't it seem "long"? (Pun intended). We move now to decimals and learning where decimals fall in our place value charts. This is a very short chapter, and students should expect a test within the week. Also, don't forget about October calendar math. It is due on Wednesday, November 2nd. Look for the November calendar by the end of the week!
What's Happening?
- Thursday, November 3rd: Picture Re-take Day
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