This week in 5th grade we went camping (well sort of!). We completed an Inference Project where students "participated" in a camping trip and the various shenanigans that took place along the way. There was a stolen backpack, a doomed hike, campfire stories, and much more! The activity I used was from the Teachers Pay Teachers store called: Teaching With a Mountain View. You can find the activity I used here: Inference Project.
In history this week we turned our class into a courtroom with the Honorable Judge Esterhuizen presiding! The students participated in mock trials of Civil War era figures including: John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Eli Whitney, Cyrus McCormick, and Frederick Douglass. These kids had such a great time researching their arguments and challenging themselves to see things from another point of view. Many students really had to stretch their imaginations to imagine what it would have been like to have to defend someone whom they felt was guilty or to have to prosecute someone whom they thought was innocent! The trials turned out really well! I even had a parent come to me and say that their student came home talking about how much she enjoys arguing! 😛
Researching their case!
Casework!
I will add some pictures and video of our trials in action once I can get them from my phone!
We have been quite busy lately and I have completely forgotten to post any updates! Here's a look at what we've been up to for the past month or so.
First up: We added a new addition to our classroom family. Everyone say hello to Alexander Hamsterton!
This past week was Read Across America and we celebrated with spirit days each day! I will upload more pictures as I get them! Here are some pictures of us buddy reading with Mrs. Harris' 3rd graders.
Reading to Alexander :)
A few weeks ago the kiddos created cause and effect comic strips! Here are two examples!
Here is a compilation of a few whiteboard activities we have had:
During the teacher work days before the kiddos came back, I worked on some new classroom decor :) I am quite pleased with how it turned out!
It's been a while since I've posted so this is going to be a post filled with some activities that happened before our winter break and a few things that happened during our first two days back!
The week before winter break we did activities as a whole fifth grade group. One of the things we did was a fun STEM project where we launched "presents" (hershey kisses) into "Santa's present sack"
(a bucket) :). The students were paired up and given two yards of masking tape, yarn, pop sickle sticks, and a plastic cup and were tasked with creating a slingshot/catapult that would be able to launch a Hershey kiss down the hallway and hopefully make it into the bucket.
Here are some pictures of their preparation:
Here are some of the creations in action:
Now on to our first two days post-break. This week in history we spent some time reviewing the different taxes placed in the American colonists by the British government, specifically the Stamp Act. We talked about what sorts of problems the Stamp Act caused for the colonists.
The kiddos then paired up and wrote skits depicting some of the different real life struggles the Stamp Act caused. They wrote from the perspective of a small family whose daughter found out there would be a heavy tax on her marriage license in order for her to marry. They also wrote from the perspective of a sailor attempting to buy playing cards before heading out to sea. He realizes that the tax on his playing cards is just as much as the cards themselves and he feels cheated because he was not even given a say in whether or not he thought the taxes were fair (taxation without representation).
I hope everyone has a great snowy weekend and stays nice and warm! I know I am! I'll be cozied up reading a book most of this weekend :)
For the past two weeks we have been focusing on analyzing characters in fiction. This past week we started putting what we have learned into action with character analysis projects! These took a lot of hard work from the students but they turned out great! We worked on using evidence from the text to support our opinions about characters in our reading group books. These kids filled their books with sticky notes, marking each and every page when they found evidence. They would come up to me and ask: "Would "determination" be a good trait for my character?" and I'd say "Well, let's see, do you remember any events in the book that would have shown your character being determined?" and then I would see their faces light up and they'd say "Yeah! I remember a part! It was back in the beginning when he/she......." and so on. I got so much joy from seeing them all beginning to make connections in literature and truly begin to have conversations with their books. When I told them they would be having conversations with their books they all looked at me like I was crazy, but by the end of the week I am sure they all understood what I meant. One of the projects that the students had fun with was when we made Character Selfies! The kiddos had to imagine that they were a character from their book and think about what that character would have taken a selfie of. They had to decide what their character's mood would be and why that particular event would have been important enough to that character to document it with a selfie. Here are some of the results:
We also made character word clouds with the traits describing the characters we chose! They turned out great and the kids really put a lot of thought into them!
We ended the week talking about all of the things we are thankful for:
I hope everyone had a great weekend and stayed warm with all this wind!
