Greetings all!
I hope you all had a great weekend! Schedule update: we have swapped specials days so our Thursday PE/Music is now on Fridays and Art is on Thursdays. Message from our Guidance Counselor, Kristen Billings: Small guidance groups will be starting this week! Small groups are an opportunity for students to meet in a quiet, relaxed setting with peers to make new friends and practice social skills. All students will be invited to be in a small group at some point in the year. Small groups will happen during snack or lunch time and will be held outdoors (weather permitting). Please feel free to contact Kristen Billings, School Counselor, with any questions. Upcoming events: - Wednesday, September 29th (this Wednesday) is picture day! Picture order forms were sent home this past Friday. They need to be returned on Wednesday if you are not ordering online, online orders need to be placed by Wednesday. Please let me know ASAP if you need a new copy of the order form because I need to get more copies from the office. - Early release day: October 8th. Students will be dismissed starting at 12:25. Please let me know if students have a different dismissal plan - Fun Run: October 8th. Students will be running around the school and adults are encouraged to come cheer on their students if they can. All adults will remain outside of the school building to keep our Covid protocols in place. More information was sent home on Friday (purple letter) with more information about this fundraiser. This is my first Orchard Fun Run, so I may not be able to answer your questions, but I can connect you with someone who can if you have any questions or concerns. We have had a great start to our year and are continuing to master our expectations and routines in 5th grade! We just earned our 100 apples for our class and will be celebrating tomorrow with 15 minutes of extra recess. As always, feel free to reach out if you need anything! Sincerely, Ms. Petzold
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Greetings families!
It's the start of our 5th week of school, can you believe it?! Here are some upcoming events to be aware of: - This Friday, September 24th is our first early release Friday. Students will be dismissed at 12:30. They will have lunch and snack at school, so if they bring food from home, make sure they are ready for snack and lunch! Lunch will be in our classroom, so please don't send in any peanut/tree nut items for lunch on that day. ***Also, if your student's dismissal plan is different due to the early release, please let me know! - Picture Day is next Wednesday, September 29th, so be ready for that. - Fun Run is on October 8th. More information will come in a future newsletter! If you wanted to order Scholastic books this month, the deadline is September 30th! Remember that any books ordered using our class code helps earn points redeemable for free books for our classroom library! I also got a notification that Scholastic shipping times are longer than usual right now, so I will keep you updated on arrival times for those books. Use this link to order books: https://orders.scholastic.com/YFL3T As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns! Sincerely, Ms. Petzold Hi all!
I hope you all had a wonderful Labor Day weekend! I got the opportunity to go glamping in the Northeast Kingdom and it was a great weekend! This week we really got into our normal swing of things. We have been practicing our multiplication facts through finding the volume of rectangular prisms. Our students took their first spelling test this week. This will become a weekly activity for students. In science, we have been learning about the hydrosphere and all of the water on Earth. We will continue to investigate more next week. We gained a new student this week and are now up to 23 students in our class! Everyone seems to be getting along and making connections! I sent home a Scholastic book order already, but you can order books at any time from the Scholastic website. If you use our class page/classroom code, our classroom will earn points redeemable for books for our classroom library! I have included the link to our classroom page below, but our classroom code is YFL3T I will most likely do an order every month, so if you want to order this month please place your order by September 30th! Next week we will start our typing practice as a class. We will also have our first Farm to School lesson next Wednesday. We will be outside no matter what the weather, so please make sure that your student is ready to be outside for an entire hour Wednesday morning! I hope you all have an amazing weekend! Sincerely, Ms. Petzold Hi all!
Thank you to those of you that were able to attend our virtual curriculum night! If you were not able to attend, I have summarized the information that we covered during the Zoom meeting. Below I have also included photos of our classroom and a copy of our current daily schedule so you can see what a day in the life of a 5th grader is! Guidance: our school counselor, Auriel Gray has taken a year’s leave of absence, so we have an interim guidance counselor named Kristen Billings. She is wonderful and has already made some great connections with students. PTO: The PTO has asked me to share the link to Konstella with you here Konstella is a communication software to create more parent engagement with the PTO and happenings at Orchard School. 5th Grade Curriculum Math: We work a lot on multiplication and division skills with 2x2 digit numbers and 3x1 digit numbers. We practice multiplication through finding volume of 3-D shapes and we start to investigate surface area. We work with addition and subtraction of decimals as well as multiplying decimals by whole numbers. We learn to add/subtract/multiply/and divide fractions. Finding equivalent fractions is something that we also focus on to support these skills. We will also delve into the order of operations or PEMDAS so that students know how to solve multi-step problems. Science: I usually teach one unit of science, then one of social studies and switch off so that we can really delve deeply into topics. We start off with Earth Systems and the Water Cycle. Our next unit will be on Ecosystems and the Food Web. In the spring we plan to attend Starbase, which is building and launching rockets. Last year we did this virtually and then Starbase staff came to help us launch rockets at school, but this year the plan is to go to Starbase and get the full experience there! Social Studies: We start of the year with Government, then go into Westward Expansion. We end the year with the Civil War, where students will have a self-led research project on a Civil War topic. Students will have a lot of time to complete this project and will have the option to work on some elements at home as well. The project will consist of a research essay, a tri-fold presentation, and a student choice “show what you know” project that expands upon their topic. The project will be completed one piece at a time so that students will not feel overwhelmed and they will get a lot of support from me as well. Literacy/Writing: Some things we will cover this year will be poetry, research essays, figurative language, and inferences. I will work in small groups of students who will be reading and discussing the same book, teaching them to think critically about what they read. I have also made time in our schedule to have mask breaks and time outside as much as possible, especially while the weather is still nice. It is so important to focus on students’ social and emotional learning now more than ever, so know that I am making time for that as well. Students will also have a daily classroom job to teach responsibility and accountability. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I am more than happy to reply to your questions or set up a time to meet with you virtually! I look forward to this year! Hello everyone!
We have had a truly great first week of school despite the heat! Students have started to get back into the groove of things and we have started practicing our math, spelling, and writing skills. Tomorrow, September 2nd, is our virtual Curriculum Night. The time for 5th grade teachers to meet with parents is 6:30pm. Here is the info for our Zoom Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/93343739877?pwd=N3p2cDRqUnRaalpHbWxITHM5NGdyZz09 Meeting ID: 933 4373 9877 Passcode: grade5 I have also put a clickable link down below for the meeting. I will be going over the curriculum that we teach in 5th grade, talking about what our days look like, and be able to answer any questions you may have. I look forward to seeing you there! Have a wonderful Wednesday! Sincerely, Ms. Petzold |
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