Monday, April 4, 2016

April 4th-8th


“No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.”
General Announcements:
  • We hope you all had a wonderful week of rest and fun! 
  • Starting this Wednesday, students will need to leave their Chromebook and charger at school. This will be in preparation for testing next week. Chromebooks will begin going home again after testing week.
  • ACT ASPIRE Testing is next week!
    5th Grade Testing April 11-14
    Grade
    Date
    Test
    Amount of Time
    5
    Monday, April 11
    Reading
    65 minutes
    5
    Tuesday, April 12
    Math
    65 minutes
    5
    Wednesday, April 13
    English and Writing
    40 minutes and 30 minutes
    5
    Thursday, April 14
    Science
    60 minutes
    *This testing will be administered between 8:00-11:00 A.M. 
  • Please make sure your child gets a good night's sleep, eats a nutritious breakfast, and is  at school on time. 
  • Looking ahead: Hoover City Schools Middle School transition night is May 9th, 6:00-8:00 P.M. (Bumpus, Simmons, and Berry will all host transition nights at this time.) 
  • Mr. Josh Lynch, Brock's Gap/Bumpus Middle School band director, recently spoke to our students during their Music class. He sent an information letter home about band.  Let us know if this information didn't make it home and we can make sure you get another copy.  

Language Arts:
  • There will be no Tween Tribune this week. There will be a spotlight reader on Friday, April 8th! Please make sure your child has a chapter book to be reading at home. 
  • We are finishing up interpreting poetry today. The rest of the week will be spent on test preparation activities. We will be practicing using the ACT Aspire app and tools, constructed response questions, and test vocabulary words. 
  • We will have Grammar IXL contract this week. We will do it completely in class, as the kids cannot take their chromebooks home. The contract will be due Friday, April 8th. It consists of some review skills and test preparation. 

Social Studies:
    • We are beginning a new unit on slavery and the Civil War. We will begin by talking about the reforms and movements taking place in the United States at the time. We will then transition into discussing important people that spoke out against slavery. After our unit on slavery, we will talk about the Civil War. This is always a favorite topic and we look forward to lots of fun activities and projects!
    • On April 19th, we will have a quiz over the slavery portion of our unit.  
    Math:
    • This week, we will be studying customary and metric measurement conversions, exploring multiplication of decimals, and learning how to identify and classify two-dimensional figures. A new IXL contract was assigned this week. Due to the fact that students will be leaving Chromebooks at school starting Wednesday, I am going to givesome class time daily to complete IXL activities this week (and next week, if needed).  Here is Link to April 4th- 8th IXL activities.
    • Cumulative review #21 was assigned today and is due Thursday.  We will have a short quiz on Friday
    Science:
    • We are still in the midst of our "A Long Way Down: Designing Parachutes" Unit. This unit introduces the field of aerospace engineering by guiding students to explore how aerospace engineers design and test technologies to be used in extra-terrestrial (non-Earth) environments. This unit involves hands-on activities, discussions, and readings to introduce the Engineering Design Process, the work of aerospace engineers, and other engineering and technology concepts.  
    • This week we plan to design and then test our parachutes. We are pretty excited about this activity!  Today we discussed the differences in size, temperature, location in the Solar System, Surface, Quick facts, and atmospheres of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Earth's Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. 
    • Grades will be taken on class work, reading passages, and a Brain Pop quiz on gravity.