We are 4 weeks away from our 5th graders promotion and the end of the year! I can not believe that my time has flown by this quickly. There is not way I would have survived this year without my amazing co-teacher. In reading our scholars are finishing the year by reading Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. This was my favorite book in 4th grade so I am super excited to bring it to them in 5th. I even had my old copy from when I was in 4th grade. My mom was so kind to ship it to me so that I can share it with my children. They LOVED seeing my handwriting in the book from when I was about their age.
Here it is!
In Math since we are at the end of the year we are working on our adventure around the United States just like Sal! When we started this unit it was very clear to me what little our children knew about the other states. In our school we spend very little time focusing on Social Studies (I know I will get better next year, hopefully this summer I can map out a Social Studies Unit!- Any advice please send it to me!). Some of our children really had no concept that there world is so large!
We have started the unit with our scholars looking up where they are going to visit by car. They needed to know that if they wanted to go to California that they needed to travel through lots of states to get there. At each state they needed to identify at least 3 places they plan to stop. Each stop will include an attraction (beach, park, racetrack), a place to eat, and a place to rest.
Then they will need to calculate their distance to each place to think about how much gas they will need in their cars. Finally, they will determine about how much money they are going to spend in each state and decide how much money they will need in all.
This unit has been AMAZING! I used a rough skeleton of a product I found on Teachers Pay Teachers. You can find it here. Then I added in more organizers that they could use to track their trip. They are LOVING working on this- I have a hard time pulling them away! I posted my templates from the unit on Teachers Pay Teacher. I will update if I add any more!
I will update as we start to work on preparing our trip for our presentations at the end of the year.
Here are a few pictures of our students looking at a map and determining the college graduation rates in each state. They enjoyed seeing that in some states, more students are graduating college. We started to make some inferences about what the causes could be.
