Excavating the Future

Well, I told my students this morning that it is time to get them organized and ready for middle school. That seems to be one of the running themes to every second semester in fifth grade, as I learned early on in my teaching. To start the day, after P.E. I had them take out their 3-ring binders and get their folders, notebooks, and assignment notebooks and put them inside.

In Reading, we read a story about taking a journey into the depths of the ocean, where we learned about strange animals such as copepods, comb jellies, dinoflagellates, snipe eels, salps, eelpouts, and viperfish. We learned about putting endings on words (-ed, -es, s, and -ing).

The kids do have a Caesar's English quiz on Friday. Because it's a short week, we don't have spelling. Here is the list: ject (throw), dorm (sleep), magn (great), ver (true), and put (think). Possible words for them to know (they will have to know two for each):

1. ject: eject, reject, projector, inject, interject
2. dorm: dormitory, dormant
3. magn: magnify, magnificent, magnanimous
4. ver: verify, verdict, veracity
5. put: computer, dispute, reputation

I started reading Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli to the kids today. It's one of my favorites, but I've never read it out loud to a class until now. We discussed the fact that at the beginning of a story, you don't necessarily know what's going on, but that's no reason to stop reading it. This is a story about a child who became a legend in a town, and what it means to be a legend.

And our discussion of matter in Science today (or as I called it, Physics) devolved into a discussion on agriculture. I told the kids that for a week in the month of May, we are going to take some time and learn about agriculture. They need to learn at least enough that they know as much as the other 96% of Hoosiers their age!

More to come. I plan to post later on about questions the kids had about honors testing for Math as well as about a few more upcoming events.