Fifth Grade Newsletter
From: Miss Bane, Miss Dellano, Mrs. McCullough
Upcoming Events and Reminders
Date: January 10th 2014
Staff Pages
Check out our webpage to find updated information. Go to
the Lafayette School website and click on Staff Pages.
Early Dismissal on
January 17th (12:45
p.m.)
Specials Schedule
No School on Monday,
January 20th in
observance of Martin
Luther King Day.
Monday (A)
 Spanish/Academic Flex
Tuesday (B)
 LMC
Both-PE
Applied Music
Wednesday (C)
 Spanish/Character
Thursday – (D)
 Bane- Music
Dellano-Art
 PE/Health
Friday – (E)
 Spanish/Academic Flex
Applied Music
Language Arts News
HW for next week: Follow spelling outline
This week the students learned a reading strategy to use while reading independently
called Contrasts and Contradictions.
Signpost: Contrasts and Contradictions: When a character does something that contrasts with
what you’d expect or contradicts his earlier acts or statements.
Text Clue: Author shows feelings or actions the reader hasn’t seen before & doesn’t expect.
STOP and ask yourself: Why is the character doing that?
The students also completed an activity called Reading for Meaning. Students
completed this activity with a nonfiction article called “At Home in the Arctic.”
What is Reading for Meaning? Reading for Meaning is a teaching and learning
strategy that helps students become proficient at making claims, finding main
ideas, and using reasoning and details to support their ideas. In a Reading for
Meaning lesson, students are presented with a series of statements about a text
they are going to read. After reviewing the statements, they read the text and
collect evidence both for and against the statements. As they discuss their
discoveries in small groups, the students improve their abilities to make
inferences, identify the important information, and develop convincing and wellorganized explanations of what they have learned.
Science News
We are beginning a new unit in science. This week we started our work on body systems. The
first system that we are covering is the skeletal system. We have discussed the parts of a bone,
as well as the important jobs our bones have. Finally, we started identifying each of the bones,
which we will continue into next week.
Math News
In math, we are hard at work with fractions. This week, we have moved into the wonderful
world of adding and subtracting mixed numbers. We have used fraction bars, fraction strips
and pictures to model how these operations work. We will continue this topic into next week
and finish the week out with a test on Topic 10.
Social Studies News
Ch. 6 Early English Settlements
Students learn about three early English settlements in North America.
Preview

Students write a few paragraphs describing the challenges they might face in
attending school in another country.
Visual Discovery

Students analyze images of Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth to create act-itouts that show why settlers came, the hardships they endured, and the reasons
why each settlement succeeded or failed.
Reading Further

students identify events that led to King Philip’s War and analyze how the war
affected American Indians and English settlers in New England
Processing activity

Students create a real estate advertisement for either the Jamestown or the
Plymouth settlement.