Hi Parents, 
I hope you are having a great week!  At the time of my writing this blog, your kids are watching the "video". :)  They were so funny before lunch! They were sure they should have seen it BEFORE they ate today! 

Dollars for Scholars- They wrote their essays this week. I had completely forgotten about it. Thanks to Macy for reminding me! The 3 that will go on to be judged for the $50 certificate are: Macy, Megan, and Halle. I had 3 other teachers read the essays to choose the three they think answered the question. 5th graders are given 6 traits and have to choose one. Then they have to explain how that trait is important to their education. Some of the traits are respect, caring, citizenship, and responsibility. I am really happy I didn't have to choose the 3 because I thought they were a lot of good ones! 

Book Report- I have given them the outline for their book report. It will be due on May 8. That gives them about 6 weeks. Many have already chosen their person. If they need help picking, let me know. Remember they are to read a book about this person. The internet is only to be used to find extra information or if they couldn't find something in their book. I told them for their costume to please not go out and buy anything unless absolutely necessary. I told them to look in their closets, your closets, grandparents, or ask friend first to borrow something. If they choose to type the report and don't have access to a computer, let me know. We can make arrangements to work in the library before or after school. 

Reading- This week we read a story called Rachel's Journal.  This story is a young girl's journal about her family moving across America in the 1850's. We talked a lot about how difficult it was for them and the different challenges they had to face. In grammar we are talking about comparative and superlative adjectives and adverbs.  For example, we are talking about when to use good, better, best or bad, worse, worst as adjectives. This also means when do we add -er or -est to the adjective? On Wednesday, we talked about adverbs and putting more or most in front of them.  The adverbs we dealt with all ended in -ly. Their spelling this week was about working with prefixes. That also worked into our decoding this week. We broke the word into the prefix and the base or root word.  They are testing today over spelling and the story since we don't have school tomorrow. 

Math-- Okay we had to do a few days of corrections with adding our fractions with like denominators and ordering them.  Last week they did have a couple of problems with VERY LARGE denominators! Luckily the computer gave me a website just to type the numbers in to find it! It still required a lot of work for them. They had to go back to multiplying and dividing! Next week we are going to start back in our book with adding and subtracting with unlike denominators. 

Religion- This week they finished up their chapter. Next week we have mass to prepare for and I will be showing them the movie The Ten Commandments. I usually show it this week, but I wanted to finish up our chapter. Today we will be going to the chapel for the Stations of the Cross. 

Young Writers- Mrs. Burg will be sending home information on this trip. Just a reminder, I will give them their homework on Tuesday that they will be needing for what we do on Wednesday while they are gone. They will need a sack lunch and a drink. I told them I hope they have GREAT weather! I usually end up going on the days we have rain or thunderstorms! 

FYI-- Iowa Assessment Week is April 13-17.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Easter! I am heading to Doon...once again! :)  I am celebrating it with my mom and my oldest sister and her family. 
God Bless, Miss Surma