Wonderful Wednesday

Boy was it nice to have a little cooler weather and for it not to be so hot in the classroom today!  This morning, after our morning meeting we started our 6-traits writing assessment.  This is a writing assessment that is given in 5th grade, to grade the 6 traits and see how students at this grade level are writing.   It also helps drive our instruction.  We spent 45 minutes writing our rough draft and then tomorrow they will be given 60 minutes to work on their final draft and be able to use a dictionary and thasauras.  We did some practice with spelling and for reading we reinforced the vocabulary, theme question, and read chapter 2.  We talked a lot about culture and it being a common ground.  Then we made a graphic organizer for rice ( which chapter 2 was about), and had it as a snack.  We found it very interesting that at one point people used rice to barter, although I told them rice would work to barter with classwork!! We discussed main idea and details and practiced identifying them in an article.  For math we reviewed multiplying with decimals adding notes to our math notebooks and then moved on to dividing decimals by 10, 100, and 1000.  When dividing decimals we count the number of zeros in the divisor and move the decimals that many place to the left to make the number smaller. I will be doing a mastery check with dividing and multiplying decimals by 10, 100, and 1000 next Monday for a grade.  It was a GREAT day today in 5th grade!