South Central Middle School
We Have the Right Mental Attitude
📣 News From the 5th Grade:
Math with Mrs. Smith: 5th graders have been learning how our number system, base 10 numbers, works. It's all about multiplying or dividing by 10 to move from one place value to the next. They have learned that powers of 10 can be written as exponents. They have learned that it might look like the decimal point is moving, but in reality it is the digits moving from place value to place value. They have discovered that the rounding rules they worked so hard to learn last year still work to round decimals, too. They have learned the decimal place values names and that they were created by dividing by 10's. Another exciting fact they have discovered is decimals are fractions!
Students need to fix and turn back in redo papers in a timely manner. They will get full credit for anything correctly fixed. After the quarter ends , it is too late to turn in anything that was assigned for the quarter. I strongly believe they learn better by fixing their mistakes. Students are strongly encouraged to take home their binders and use the Problem Set to help them with their homework. Previous homework and exit tickets might be helpful, too. They all have a dry erase place value chart to use, too.
ELA with Miss Clifford: In English Language Arts, we recently started our curriculum Into Reading. We just finished our first module and will be working on our first writing piece of the year, an expository essay. Within the writing, we will be focusing on the RACES writing format to help prove and support our answers using evidence from the passages we read. We will also be working on what it means to plan, draft, edit, and revise. This will help students be able to put it into practice with later writing assignments.
Science with Mr. Seasly: Students just completed their first unit on ecosystems, where they learned about the many different interactions organisms have in nature with one another. They learned about how organisms depend upon each other to survive. We discussed predator-prey, parasitism, commensalism, and mutualistic relationships. Our next unit will deal with the properties of light (e.g. transmission, transparent, translucent, opaque, reflection, refraction, and absorption). Students will learn how to correctly figure out what light will do when it hits certain types of surfaces and explain why we see colors.
Social Studies with Mr. Seasly: Students have learned about locating cities in the United States on a map using only latitude and longitude coordinates. We have also discussed where to place events on a timeline, depending where they are BC/BCE or AD/CE dates.
We have just started the Mayans and how they farmed, governed themselves, practiced religion, and inventions/creations. Students seem to like the Ancient Civilizations (e.g. Mayans, Aztecs, & Incas), because of how different they are from us today and the "weird" things (e.g. sacrifices, how they dressed or farmed) they did.
Technology with Mrs. Kluge: The beginning of the year has created some unique challenges for 5th grade Tech class with a 2 day week, a 4 day week and a week of outdoor school. Ms. Clifford's class finally made it to tech this week! Now that our schedules have become a little more consistent, we took the first few days to get to know each other and to focus on the good things that we have going on in our lives. We are working on creating a class playlist of walkup songs that help to motivate and encourage us as we work or take on hard tasks. We have also been learning about proper email writing. Students are working on learning new features in our emails such as labeling emails, deleting emails, responding to emails and, most importantly, reading emails on a daily basis! In the coming weeks, we will be learning about some of the other applications that Google offers and how students can use to help make projects and classwork easier.
About Us
Email: amckee@south-central.org
Website: www.south-central.org
Phone: 419-752-0011