LANGUAGE ARTS AND HISTORY:

Fifth grade has just landed in America as English colonists!  We are imagining ourselves in the shoes of those brave people who founded the first successful English settlement. So far, we “gentlemen” have voyaged from England to the shores of Virginia and met the Powhatan Indians. We wrote day-in-the-life journal entries from the point of view of a Woodland Indian. Now we are wondering whether we can survive without much training in agriculture or experience in manual labor. Will Chief Powhatan and his tribe help us?  

When we are not exploring the New World, we are drafting essays about women’s suffrage for the annual Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest in our Language Arts class. This year’s topic focuses on the 19th Amendment and its impact on America. For some students, like H.W., this is the best part of Language Arts-- imagining that we get to live in 1919! What excitement 5th grade is experiencing as we time travel between 1607, 1919, and 2018!  

MATH AND SCIENCE:

Eureka!

Will it sink or will it float? Why? Fifth grade students investigated the physical property of density in a collaborative research assignment with Grade Six. Topics included mass, volume, density, and concentration, as well as more complex concepts such as ideal gas laws and Archimedes principle.  Students shared their findings with one another and then applied their knowledge and skills in hands-on lab practical. In the laboratory, students calculated the density of air and compared it to a known standard and found the “number density” of Skittles. They formed and tested hypotheses regarding which brand of soap would float, and why. They also formed and tested hypotheses about the densities of various liquids. We had a great time getting our hands wet and the tables sticky!

“My favorite learning experiment was this week was in science. I got to learn about volume and density. I also got to learn about why a certain soap floated and the other two sunk to the bottom.” ~Addison

“I really enjoyed the density lab in science. One of the things I really liked about it was that there was a lot of teamwork involved. Also it was very fun and exciting to be in the lab with my friends having fun.” ~Morgan

This year, blog posts will be written by students so that they can reflect on their learning. Please read on from M.Y.:

This week in History 5th grade did a history-about-me sheet and filled out a map of the 50 states. We also worked on other maps. In Latin we reviewed the verb charts and played flyswatter. In Language Arts we started making lightbulbs about this year to show the things we want to do, think, and create. Also, we had to write a paragraph about a brownie before we ate the brownie sitting in front of us. Last, but not least, we read a book called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick and then found a picture and caption from the book and wrote our own story about that picture and caption.

To cap off our year of studying Latin, middle school students hosted our annual Roman carnival. Fifth and sixth graders chose Roman deities to represent, researched them, and completed mini projects about their characters. Students were grouped by common traits of the deities, or by family members, and were then tasked to create a game based off their gods' skills. With the  help of fourth grade assistants, students set up game booths and entertained the rest of campus. We had everything from Jupiter and Juno's "Knock Down" to Vesta and Ceres' bread toss, Mars, Mercury, Janus, and Hercules' obstacle course to Minerva and Fortuna's "Test your Knowledge", Apollo and Faunus' musical chairs to Venus, Flora, and Cupid's hair and beauty salon plus many more gods and games. Samson, Mrs. Joyce's gentle dog, helped guard the underworld. We hope that the lower school and preschool students had as much fun as the middle schoolers did!  What a great way to end standardized testing week!

As a completion to our study of force and motion, 5th graders "played with" Newton's three Laws of Motion in a set of stations. Each station featured either a written set of everyday scenarios or a set of everyday objects, which students tested to determine which of the three laws operated when these objects are used. We looked at everything from a toy car riding down a "ramp" (a binder) to spinning two kinds of eggs-- raw and hard-boiled to a flinging an index card with a penny on top of it. The variety of stations required students to put on their thinking caps and play with the objects to decide which law applied. Was a chair being moved with a stack of books on it demonstrating the first law, that an object at rest stays at rest until acted upon by an unbalanced force?  Or, did second law--that force equals mass times acceleration--apply? You could argue both; however, when you begin to remove books from the stack and observe that the chair is easier to push, then the second law clearly applies.

Newton's laws are important foundations of physics, and any child can memorize them by reading them over and over. However, the only way truly to understand how these laws work is to investigate them in an interactive manner. I found that moving around the room and physically handling and testing objects helped students to gain a deeper comprehension of the three laws, their differences, and how sometimes they can work together in various situations. Moreover, who doesn't want to flick coins and play with toy cars?

Fifth grade just completed our persuasive writing unit. Learning how to convince someone to agree with your position has proven quite a challenge, and students worked hard to do so.  One of the most visible forms of persuasive writing is advertisements, and the class finished the unit with a snack food advertising campaign. I introduced students to the job of a copywriter and the idea of the creative brief, which is the key written item in an advertising campaign. Students broke into advertising teams, chose a snack food (Goldfish, Pringles, Lays Original Potato Chips, Animal Crackers, Cheez-Its, and Oreos), and commenced to taste test research to develop their campaign. Snacking for school work! Each student in the team was assigned to design one of three ads: a magazine ad, a billboard, or a television commercial. Students had already created commercials in Technology class, so they were professionals. The final campaigns were presented to the fourth grade class, our clients. Each snack food campaign had to "sell" its product and win over the fourth graders with all three ads and an effective speech. There was some serious competition occurring in our classroom! The ultimate winner was the Cheez-Its group, which won for the best marketing campaign. The favorite snack food in terms of taste, however, was Pringles. What a fun, memorable way to learn how to write and speak persuasively!