Getting Ready for Middle School

Can you believe there's only 42 days left of fifth grade??? It's crazy how quickly time has been moving lately! We have just over 8 weeks left of school. And considering that the last two weeks will be filled with field trips, parties, picnics, and American Grandstand, we really only have about 7 weeks of actual learning time. Of course, it REALLY comes down to even less than that since we have Play Day, assemblies, chorus performances, art fair, and all sorts of other things going on during that same time!

So the moral of the story is WE HAVE VERY LITTLE TIME LEFT TO GET YOUR KIDS READY FOR SIXTH GRADE!!!! These last several weeks will be a crucial time for getting the kids ready for middle school. I will shifting gears in math and focusing specifically on what they'll need to know when they walk in the door in August.

I already have a pretty good idea of which kids will be placed in advanced math classes based on this year's math grades. With those kids, I will be introducing them to a whole lot of pre-algreba skills, including exponents, single and multi-step equations, order of operations, and so forth. We have touched on most of the skills already, but we will go into a bit more depth over the next few weeks. For the rest of the class, and also with the advanced-class-bound students, we will be turning our attention back to computations - mainly dealing with multiplication, division, and fractions.

The focus will be on finding short cuts and being able to fluently solve multi-digit problems mentally rather than on paper. As I am well aware that there are many middle school teachers who are still teaching out of out-dated math books, I will also re-introduce the kids to the standard, traditional algorithms. But I will make sure the kids understand HOW and WHY the algorithms work and what the relationship is between those algorithms and clustering. This way when students get into a more "traditional" math environment, they'll have an edge up because they'll understand what's REALLY going on with the numbers when they long divide.

In social studies we will be exploring the events that led up to the Civil War. We're actually quite a bit behind in our social studies, but the timing couldn't be better with the latest "Confederate History Month" controversy! We'll be digging deep to try to understand the motivations for the abolitionist movement, the formation of the Confederacy, and the decision to go to war.

Finally, in science we will be concentrating on our science fair projects. Just as a reminder - all writing, tables, and graphs on the display boards, aside from headings and titles, are required to be TYPED. We will be using a large portion of our time on Fridays to type the reports, make tables, and design graphs. No student has an excuse to not have their project typed.

We've got loads of fun stuff happening over the next several weeks, and nobody wants to be left out of anything! So let's make sure everyone is working hard every single day from here on out!