Today was the first quarter of another 4 day week. Wow, time is racing by quickly!  On Wednesday, there will be a school holiday in honor of Veterans Day.  Because we have a short week, we are not going to start a new vocabulary set.  We took the test today for last week’s words, and throughout this week, we will focus on some mini-lessons on commonly misused homophones.

In Mathematics, we are continuing to work with triangles.  Today, students began work on their triangle posters. Each student is creating a poster on which they will measure all the angles and sides of a triangle, prove that the interior angles add up to 180 degrees, and classify they triangle by both sides and angles.

For a quick review on classifying triangles by angles and sides, follow this link. You can put your mouse over one of the types of triangles, and a triangle will appear that matches that classification.  When you are finished reading and looking at them, quiz yourself by matching the given triangles to the correct classifications.

Also, you can check out a whole set of activities about classifying triangles on the website Study Stack.  There are options to use flashcards, a study stack, a study table, a matching game, a hangman game, a crossword, a scramble, a fill in the blank, and a bug match game.  Each activity has to do with the definitions for the different types of triangle classifications.  Keep in mind that this study stack also includes equiangular triangles which are triangles with all 3 equal angles.

In Marin Headlands field trip fund raising news, we made another $270 this weekend at another successful bake sale.  Thanks so much to all the parents and students who helped out.  Also, we are having our BAM Cafe this Thursday, November 12th from 4:30 to 6:30.  Volunteer sign-up notices were sent out last week, and a few still need to be returned.  Make sure to bring them back tomorrow.  The event will happen in the upstairs hallway and we will be offering tastings and selling the cookbook.  Make sure to get ingredients ready to be able to make your dish for Thursday. Also, please return checks for parent contributions to the field trip fund this week.  Thanks!

Homework:

1. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and fill out 2 predictions.  Make sure to cite evidence.
2. Mathematics: Practice Set 21 – Naming angles, division practice, and exponent practice.

Mr. Weis

I’m running from conferences to the PTA meeting, and I only have a few minutes to make a post, so this is going to be quick.

Tomorrow we will be walking over to Zellerbach Hal on the Cal campus to go see a performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost. In class today, we used our computer time to learn a bit about how to make better internet searches using google. The students were able to locate the Cal Performances website and then navigate to a PDF study guide. They then downloaded the study guide and used information from it to fill out a graphic organizer on the play. Here is a link to the study guide if you would like to know a little more about the performance.

Today we sent home fliers about the BAM Cafe. Please respond promptly and make sure your calendars are marked for the event. It will be held on Thursday, November 12 from 4:30 to 6:30 upstairs.

Now that I am about to run, I wonder if I really did type this in a jiffy? What exactly is a jiffy anyway? I was able to find the answer through a google book search. (Did you know that there are many books completely scanned in and archived in google?) Follow this link to take a look at an excerpt from the book What in the word? and learn where the word came from.

Homework:

1. Math: Explain how to find a missing angle in a triangle to someone.
2. Vocab: Finish Packet
3. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and fill out the clarification section in your reading log.

Mr. Weis

Mr. Weis’ delicious.com page of course. It’s delicious because that’s the name of the site.  It’s informative because there is information about lots of websites and it’s sticky because I attach lots of of links to it. Delicious is a social bookmarking service that is made to catalog and share internet bookmarks.  I created my delicious page last year and used it for a few different links for students in the class, and this year I have mainly been using it to link math games. Today I’ll give a brief description of how to use my delicious page.

First of all, you need to type the address of the page into your web browser.  http://delicious.com/misterweis

If you typed it in correctly (make sure to spell out mister, my brother actually has the mrweis site) then you should see something that looks like this.

Once there, the main thing that you will see is the bookmark links.  Each bookmark has a little blurb that describes the website and how it can be used.

If you look slightly to the right you will see a list of tags.  Tags are keywords that describe the website.  They may be general like language arts or math, or they may be specific like angles or etymology.  You can use these tags to get a better idea about what the website will be all about.

If you keep going further across the page to the right, there is another box with a list of tags that I use.  If you click on one of those tags, it will then make it so you will only see bookmarks of websites with that tag.  If you click another tag, it will further limit the bookmarks to only websites that I used both those tags on.  This allows you to slowly narrow down your search through my bookmarks.

I’ll continue to update the delicious website this year with resources we use in class and resources I mention on this website.  Feel free to browse around the site and visit the links.  Enjoy!

In vocabulary this week, we are studying words with the prefixes mono, bi, and tri.  The words of the week are monologue, monopoly, monotony, bilingual, bisect, triathlon, trilogy, and triangle.  We have a short week, and we will be moving quickly through the packet, so make sure your child is getting all the work done each night.

In math our focus this week is on identifying and determining the values of opposite and adjacent angles, and on finding missing angle measurements inside triangles.

On Thursday we will walk over to Zellerbach Hall to see a performance of an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.  Permission slips will be sent home tomorrow and we have a few spots for chaperons, so if you are free on Thursday from 10:15 until about 12:30 and are able to comfortably walk from BAM to Cal, let me know.

Homework:

1. Vocabulary:  Sort
2. Math:  Finish page from class on adjacent and opposite angles, Study Link Page 59
3. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and make predictions in the reading log.
4. Other:  Finish any illustrations or cover art submissions for the recipe cook book.

Mr. Weis

In drama news, we had our first session with Opera Piccola yesterday.  Opera Piccola, which translates literally to “small works” is an Oakland theater company that is involved with a number of exciting projects with young people around the Bay Area.  The 5th Grade is lucky to have them coming to do some theater work with us.  We will meet for weekly sessions and students will work on building dramatic skills as well as writing some of their own works.  It will all culminate in a final evening  performance in the winter.  The same group also worked with the 4th Grade last year, so the curriculum we are designing with Opera Piccola will work on building and extending on the students’ prior drama work.

Each week we spend time in class looking very closely at our vocabulary words.  Among other things, we look at spelling patters, affixes, and roots.  A powerful way to expand one’s vocabulary is to delve into the realm of etymology, or the study of word origins.  I strongly recommend checking out The Online Etymology Dictionary.  While there, you can read about how many words shifted in use, meaning, and construction in different languages. It is also a good way to check to see if a word either fits a similar spelling pattern or if it actually shares a common root.

Homework:

1. Language Arts: Vocabulary Sentences
2. Mathematics: Finish Angle Estimation worksheet from class
3. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and fill out clarification reading log

Mr. Weis

I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky
And all around I heard you pass
Like ladies skirts across the grass
O wind, a-blowing all day long
O wind, that sings so loud a song.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

How about the weather last night and today?  What an incredibly blustery day it has been! Previously we have done jounral writing about the rain, and today I felt it fitting to do a writing activity connected to the incredible winds.  We started by discussing the concept of personification, of giving human characteristics to something nonhuman.  Together we wrote a bit about the wind, attributing emotions and human-like actions to the winds movement and the way it affects different environments.  Then students worked to create their own stanzas describing how the wind danced, howled, knocked, kicked, and screamed.  The students wrote their poems on swirling winds, and they will go up on the wall outside the room in the next few days, along with some other personified Fall items.  I’ll make sure to take some pictures when it all comes together, and if you are in the building for a conference next week, make sure to stop and take a look at the poetry work up on the walls.

Tonight I just finished going through the process of creating a google group for 5th Grade families at BAM.  A google group is a website hosted by google that is used to facilitate communication between a group of people.  I sent out invites that you should all receive some time tomorrow after google verifies that I am a real human being and not an internet spam bot.  If you do not get the invite, or you are feeling a bit impatient to join, you can go directly to the group at http://groups.google.com/group/bam-5th-grade-families

In Headlands Institute field trip news, this past weekend we had our first official fundraising activity with a bake sale connected to the Cal football game parking at the school.  Thanks to all the families that donated drinks, baked goods, and snacks to sell, and to the families and students who stopped by and helped volunteer at the table.  We raised about $370!  Way to go! Lets keep up the hard work and dedication.

In reading we continued our work with clarification as we dissected different types of context clues and practiced being word detectives.  Students identified clarification strategies of linked synonyms, antonyms, appositives, causes/effects, and familiar word parts as they deduced the meaning of some highly advanced vocabulary words.

In math this week, we have transitioned to geometry and working with angles.  The goals this week are:

• To be able to identify and define acute, obtuse, right, and reflex angles.
• To be able to state the total number of degrees in a circle.
• To be able to use a protractor to accurately measure an angle.

Homework:

1. Language Arts: Vocabulary – Definitions and CLOZE
2. Mathematics: Study Link 3.4 – Angle Measures
3. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and write 2 predictions in reading log.

Mr. Weis

Today in writing, the students worked on their peer edits for their food memoirs.  They read through each other’s essays and identified strengths and areas needing improvement in both mechanics and content.  Every week or two in writing, we also focus on a specific grammar topic or mechanic.  Currently, we are working with capitalization rules.  In order to really delve deeply into the topic, we will use real text examples, collaborative investigations, and independent practice.  You may have noticed that in the past couple vocabulary tests, students have not only written sentences with the vocabulary words, but they have also had to write sentences with specific grammatical conventions.   Today, during independent reading, students searched their books for examples of different capitalization rules.  Previously this year, we focused on quotation rules and word choice with the three versions of there, their, and they’re.

In mathematics, we practiced using magnitude estimates in multiplication problems.  As we worked through Unit 2, errors in decimal placement were one of the most common mistakes.  Using a quick magnitude estimate can help to self monitor if an answer seems reasonable or not. Applying quick magnitude estimates, especially for products in multiplication problems, can greatly assist in catching errors and eliminating answers in multiple choice tests.

In non-academic news, tomorrow we will have our first assembly connected with the roll out of the Positive Behavior Support (PBS) program at BAM.  Positive Behavior Support involve targeting and positively reinforcing the behaviors we want to see at BAM.  This is a departure from most common behavior systems at schools that focus predominately on reacting to negative behavior with negative consequences.  The main idea of PBS is to recognize and reward the positive behaviors that we want to see instead of just providing negative attention to students exhibiting behaviors we don’t want to see.  You can read more about PBS at the main website.

Additionally, you can watch some videos to get an idea of how PBS has been applied at other schools.  At BAM, a committee has been formed that includes parents, teachers, administrators, and school support staff.  Together, the committee, the entire staff, and the school community will work together over this year to make steps in the direction of PBS with the ultimate goal of improving the overall school climate at BAM.  This first assembly will focus on the norm Be Respectful, and several students who have exemplified the norm will be recognized.

Homework:

1. Math:  Study Link for Lesson 2.7
2. Vocab:  Finish packet and study for test
3. Language Arts:  Continue working on Recipe Food Memoir for the 5th Grade Cookbook
4. Reading:  Read for 25 minutes and fill out reading log. Make sure to get the log signed!

Mr. Weis

This students have dubbed this week “The Week of Tests,” and thankfully we are past the halfway point.  We have been busy working on finishing up all the final assessments before the grading period ends on Friday.  Students have already completed the district math assessment and the district writing assessment.  I have greatly appreciated the dedication, effort, and work ethic displayed by the students as they have been doing the assessments.  We have just a couple more to go, including the Unit 2 math test, and a Unit 1 Social Studies test.

There were 3 important notices sent home today regarding the Marin Headlands Institute field trip.  The first was an update about the information discussed at the family meeting last week and an update on fundraising opportunities.  Please take a moment to look it over and return the fundraising volunteer sign-up on the back page.  The second notice was a brief flier about the fundraiser this weekend involving selling refreshments at the Cal parking fundraiser.  If you are able to help out with a donation or with manning the parking lot, please send back the bottom of that form.  If you can’t make it this week, there will be another opportunity on November 7.  The third notice was information about the forthcoming BAM 5th Grade Memoir Cookbook.  Each student was given a set of interview questions and a description of the assignment.   This is an important assignment that not only will help our fundraising, but that ties together some of the different curriculum we have been working with in class.  I’ll copy and paste the description here:

As our memoir unit is coming to an end, the students are each writing a Food Memoir about some memorable experience connected to food.  The topics span a range of experiences, and different students are writing about mouth-watering delicacies, unique restaurant or dining experiences, or culinary catastrophes.  In our current Social Studies unit, we are also discussing the customs, traditions and cultural practices unique to different tribes of American Indians.  Stemming from these two projects, Miss Klein and I decided to do another project, a Food Memoir Cookbook.

Students will interview a family member about a recipe that is important to them.  Students will then write up that recipe along with a short memoir.  The resulting pieces will be bound together as a compilation of recipes and memoirs from the entire 5^th Grade.  The cookbook will then be sold at a Tea Party on the evening of November 12 to families from the entire school and local community.   We will use the proceeds as part of our fundraising for the Marin Headlands overnight trip.

Please take the time to help your child to complete their “Food Memoir” interview.  This is a wonderful opportunity for you to share some memories with your child and to discuss traditions and customs that are important to your whole family.

The food memoir recipe and memoir is due on Monday at the latest.  If you can get it in by Friday, that would be great!

Yesterday we did our morning work by reading a short article about the recent discovery of 32 new planets by a team of European astronomers.  Here is a link to the article we read.  The students then wrote short journal pieces about the discovery.  For more information, you can go directly to the source at the European Southern Observatory’s webpage.

You can also follow the link of the picture below to get to the press release page with more detailed information on the discovery and some links to pictures and a couple videos explaining the discovery in greater detail.  Enjoy!

Homework:

1. Vocabulary:  Write Sentences
2. Language Arts:  Food Memoir Recipe Interview (Due Monday)
3. Reading:  Read for 25 minutes and fill out Summary section on Thursday’s log section.  (Students will do the clarification section tomorrow night)

Mr. Weis

In Reading today, we began reading the short story La Bamba by the author Gary Soto.  The story comes from the book Baseball in April and Other Short Stories. As we read, we used comprehension strategies of predicting, summarizing, and questioning.  Today we also began a new activity called Pass the Question.  During the activitiy, students periodically write questions related to the text in the form of a Right There, Connect, or In Your Head question.  Right there questions have answers that can be found directly in one part of the text.  Connect questions require the reader to connect at least 2 pieces of information from the text, and In Your Head questions are thinking questions that require the reader to use information as well as their own opinion to come up with an answer.  In Pass the Question, students write questions and pass them on to each other.  When a student receives a question, it is their job to first identify what type of question it is, and then provide a clear answer.  This is meant to not only increase comprehension of the text, but to also help students to understand how to properly classify questions, and then apply that information as they come up with their answers.  By the end of this week, we will add our fourth major reading comprehension strategy of clarification.

Vocabulary this week includes four prefixes: pre-, post-, fore-, and after- The eight focus words of the week are: prepare, prefix, forethought, forefather, postpone, postdate, afterword, and afternoon.

Math this week will mostly be review and assessments including a district assessment on Tuesday and the Unit 2 assessment on Thursday.  The district assessment will cover all materials so far this year, and the Unit 2 assessment will cover decimal computation (addition, subtraction, and multiplication), rounding, and algebraic expressions with single variables.

In Writing we are continuing to work on food memoirs.  Students were busy today working on their first drafts and trying to incorporate some great sensory images, vivid literal and figurative descriptions of the food, and a cohesive plot structure with a clear beginning, middle, and end.  We had a few students share out some paragraphs from their writing and we all enjoyed listening to some wonderful compositions.  On Wednesday we will have the district writing assessment, which will be a basic memoir prompt, and by the end of next week, we will finish our memoir unit.

Have you signed up yet for your Parent/Teacher Conference?  I sent home reminders of meeting times on Friday and extra sign-up sheets today.  Please try to get forms back as soon as possible so I can do my best to accommodate everyone’s schedule.

Homework:

1. Math: Review District Study Guide Problems
2. Vocabulary:  Complete Word Sort in weekly packet.
3. Language Arts:  Complete at least 3 paragraphs of your Food Memoir rough draft.
4. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and complete 2 predictions in your reading log.

Mr. Weis

Throughout the year, we will spend about 6 weeks each on specific writing genres.  Our first writing genre this year is memoir.  Some memoir writing we have done so far includes our 4th Grade Memory Poems, our Mathographies, and a memoir connected to a mode of transportation.  As we have been writing memoirs, we have also been reading lots of memoirs including selections from What It Is by Lynda Barry, Knots in My Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli, and Childtimes: A Three Generation Memoir by Eloise Greenfield.  Our next memoir will be a food memoir and will focus on a specific experience, either positive or negative, with food.  We’ve been doing some prewriting brainstoriming lists of foods, and today we read a piece by the poet and prose writer Naomi Shihab Nye called Mint Snowball and we identified some writing techniques used to enhance the descriptions in our writing. We highlighted the use of sensory details as well as some figurative language and similes as we read about the author’s memory of a mint ice cream treat from her childhood.

One day a week, during our literacy block, we check out the laptop mobile lab and the students use the computers.  The past few weeks we have been doing some basic computer literacy work with Mac OSX and learning about formatting and word processing using Microsoft Word.  This week the students were given a chance to experiment with a web-based graphic organizer called bubbl.us  Bubbl.us allows users to quickly create cluster graphic organizers, save them on the web and print them out.  The students began organizing some of their ideas about possible food memoir topics.  You can take a look and try making some bubbls yourself by following this link.

Homework:

1. Vocabulary: Finish packet and study words for test.
2. Math: Study Link Page 33 – Open Number Sentences
3. Reading: Read for 25 minutes and fill out Reading Log.  Get Reading Log signed!

Mr. Weis

Welcome everyone to the home of the classroom blog for Mr. Weis’ 5th grade class at Berkeley Arts Magnet.  Last year I updated this page daily with information on homework and what we were learning about in class.  I also included links to tutorials, videos, web resources, and online games that connected to the what we were learning about in class.  I received such a positive response last year that I am actually building my own new and improved website for this year.  WordPress has been a nice place to host the site, but I’d ultimately like to have some features that are not accessible here.  However, in the meantime I will continue to use this site to provide updates and information on what is going on in the classroom.  Today’s blog post will be dedicated to explaining some of the routines we are developing in class.

Each week in Vocabulary we will have a spelling pattern focus and a group of 8 or so words that incorporate the spelling pattern.  Last week, we focused on singular and plural words, and particularly on words with an (f) to (ves) change, vowel changes, and no changes.  The focus words of last week were wife/wives, leaf/leaves, wolf/wolves, loaf/loaves, mouse/mice, woman/women, sheep, deer.  In Vocabulary this week we are looking at words with the prefixes re and un, meaning again and not.  Our focus words this week are rebuild, unable, recycle, uncertain, review, unusual, reuse, and unequal.

In Math we have had a very specific goal or two for each week.  Usually, from Monday through Wednesday, instruction will focus on supporting the goal or goals.  At the end of Math on Wednesday, each student will take a 5 question quiz.  To get a passing grade on the quiz requires 4 or 5 of the questions correct.  On Thursday and Friday, we then learn games or do activities that reinforce or extend on the weekly goals.  During this time, students who have proven proficient at the weekly goals are given an opportunity for academic extensions and challenge activities along with these games.   Students with scores of 0-3 are pulled for individual or small group help to make sure they are proficient at the grade level standard.  Once they are ready, they will get a chance to do a quiz retake.  Students should bring home a graded copy of their quiz along with the goal or goals each week in their Friday Folder.

Last week our Math goal was:  Students will be able to add, subtract, and divide with numbers with decimal places up to the thousands.  Our math goals this week are: Students will be able to round a number with a decimal, and solve problems with expressions and number sentences with a single variable. (Whenever you see an underlined group of words in the blog, that means I have inserted a link, so feel free to click on it.  I have linked the words expressions and variables to definitions in an online math glossary.)  You can also follow this link to get to a little bit longer explanation complete with some examples.

That’s it for today.  I’ll update more later this week on what we are doing in reading and writing.

Homework:

1. Vocabulary: Definitions and CLOZE (fill in the blank)
2. Math: Variables Worksheet
3. Reading:  Read for 25 minutes and fill out reading log.  Make sure to write Questions today!

Mr. Weis