Beatrice and Anushka's Weekly Update...

Hi, this is Beatrice and Anushka here, reporting live from S.A.S. with our very own Mrs. Clayton’s class! No doubt this week was amazing and fun. We have been here for a week and we are here to report our favorite highlights. Everyone had great results for their math test and as you can imagine they were super excited to see that. Also, as usual, reading as hard as they can, hoping to complete the Ice Cream Genre Challenge to finally get the ice cream party started that they have been dreaming of for so long. And of course, everyone’s favorite, U.N. day!  Last but not least, all about our extraordinary assessments in swimming during P.E! So sit back and relax while we tell you about Mrs. Clayton’s class here at SAS. On Monday, the results of their topic 4 math test came out. With the witness of Mrs. Clayton, we know that we have scored exceptionally well. This is the evidence that we have the best teacher ever for teaching so well. Great job to all of the students for doing so well on the math test and for trying so hard as this topic was division. If you are anything like us, we sometimes had a tricky time solving the puzzles. After listening to a few other students, we agree that the test was easy, hard, and confusing in some points. If you didn’t check over your work well, there is a chance that you made a silly mistake, because checking your work is important. Estimating, exact answers, using money as models, there were so many ways that we did division. Everyone had seemed very proud of themselves when they saw their results. Some kids used that time to get help from Mrs.Clayton because they had trouble with some problems. We saw our test and let us tell you, it wasn’t as easy as it looks. We’d say that the trickiest part about the math test were the problems that included money. Most people would be thrilled to do math including money but really it is quite hard. They spent about ten minutes on EARs (Error Analysis Report), at least those who needed them (told you we scored well), and then, proceeded to doing either IXL or their enrichment booklet. Again, fantastic job on the test! Now we will tell you about what we have been doing this week in Reader’s Workshop. To begin with, we will tell you about the -drumroll please- Ice Cream Genre Challenge! The Ice Cream Genre Challenge, is a challenge (as most of you have guessed by now) where we have to read eight books each with different genres. The eight genres were; realistic fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, adventure, humor, classic, mystery, and last but not least a freebie. The freebie was any genre we felt like reading. The Ice Cream Genre Challenge will end on November 22, so that is the reason that most of us are reading as much as we can. We are wondering what was their favorite genre and did it change because they discovered a new genre? Also, are there any genres that they have discovered that they love? We know we have. There are only two more weeks, but so far about a quarter of the class is done and about half the class will be done by the end of the week! Fingers crossed that many more students will be done with their Ice Cream Genre Challenge by November 22 as hopefully they are going to be reading crazily this weekend hoping to get their cherries and certificate for finishing! A big congratulation to all the students who have already finished and those who are about to finish. Those of you who are still working on it, hang in there and keep reading! Also in reader’s workshop, Mrs.Clayton has been reading aloud from Wonder. This is an amazing book is by R.J. Palacio about an ordinary boy named Auggie a.k.a. August, who has a deformed face while we learn about his obstacles and how life isn’t always easy. We have developing reading skills, and trying to write good sticky-notes. (Some of us are still getting used to writing sticky notes and are so wrapped up into the book that guess what? We forget to write any.) It models what we should be doing with our Ice Cream Genre books, or any books that we are reading in class. The class has been writing extraordinary responses on their own so far and we hope that they keep improving on their sticky-notes throughout the year. Now, the autobiography of our very special United Nations Day! Each class created a presentation with another class to show the rest of fifth grade. We created a presentation about authors from around the world, and a big thank you to our techies Nate and Harrison for putting in all that time in to work our presentation!  The presentation was with Mr.DeMichele’s class and our eight authors from around the world were: Margaret Mahy from New Zealand, Cornelia Funke from Germany, Gary Paulsen from the U.S., Eoin Colfer from Ireland, Eva Ibbotson from Austria and Michael Morpurgo from England. Both classes did a great job doing their presentation and we wouldn't change a thing! Click here to watch the video! We learned so much about international literacy. There's a lot to be grateful for at our school.  Many different cultures and a library with too many books to choose from. Hopefully, we have convinced some of fifth grade to read books from our authors because that was our mission. All of the other classes did well on their projects for the UN day assembly too. One of them was about the true story behind nursery rhymes that children learned every single day. You would have never guessed that the tune “Rain, Rain Go Away” was actually about a thunderstorm in a war. Another presentation was about the percentage of education and amount of people that could read and write in many countries around the world. The numbers were sometimes high and sometimes harshly low, so organisations that help the countries’ education were also included so we could donate. The funniest one (in our opinion) was a remix version of a song called “I’m Reading and I Know It”. The kids were like mini versions of DJs up there! That assembly was most informative and was fun to watch. Everyone did well on their part! It was very exciting to see all of the unique clothing from different countries as almost  each student wore a piece of clothing that comes from the country that they originate from. There were tons of countries. U.S.A., Canada, India, Korea, Philippines, an  interesting and beautiful Hungarian outfit, we could go on and on. We did have swimming, but it seemed like no one cared that they had to change.  Another thing that made UN Day day fantastic, is that we got to try different foods from different countries. Some were things that we had never seen or heard of, while others were everyday foods that we had. Above all, everything tasted like a delicacy. Thank you to the moms and dads for cooking these phenomenal treats. On Tuesday we had an amazing swimming class with Ms. Wenstrom and Mrs. Bell. To begin with, we had several two swimming assessments. Diving and underwater swim. Most students did astonishingly, impressively well, considering how hard it can be to arch your back and have your chin tucked in perfectly to curl into the water (diving). As well as holding your breath while you are completely underwater and swimming for 12 meters! We’re going to tell you about the diving assessments first. We all had to dive off a diving block into the deep water pool. Most students did tremendous. They knew what to improve on their diving because we had an ipad that was filming us in delay so that we could see our diving.  Everyone at least had one thing to work on. We had to be super careful with the ipad because it could fall in the pool and also, it was drizzling. The hardest part of the assessments so far, we think for most students, is the 12 meter underwater swim! Do you know how far that is? Well, here’s the approximate answer; from one end of our classroom to the other and it seriously is NOT easy. A few tips (if you ever happen to have to do this) are: don’t look up in the underwater swim because that will make you want to breath, don’t let all your air out at once when you go under water for the underwater swim, instead slowly let it out. While we were waiting to do the assessments, we practiced our freestyle, freestyle kick, breaststroke, and our breaststroke kick. In other words we did freestyle kick to cool down from freestyle and breaststroke kick to cool down from breaststroke. We’re glad that the tests went pretty well! Unfortunately, this weekly update is over. These were not all of the details of our prodigious week of November 11-15 (we would write more but we don’t want to make it too long), but were good ones. We hope that everyone experienced  this week in a fun way. The phenomenal scores on the math test, the awesome progress on the genre challenge, our fun read aloud book and the incredible effort people made on the swimming test and the amazing UN Day. Those were all the best highlights of the week. We are grateful to have this opportunity to report this week in Mrs. Clayton’s class A.K.A the best class ever to exist. Enjoy the weekend!