Tales Of A 4-5 Something

 In 5th grade math, we were working on money management, team work, and thinking about arrays and volume. We were split up into groups and we made candy shops. There were chocolate shops, muffin shops, cotton candy, and donuts. Every group made their own menu of ten items to sell and then we spun a wheel to see how many of each item was ordered from our store. In the beginning, we only had boxes that held 10 treats (5x2). Of course, we had a lot of treats left in our shops. Everyday we had to do the math to pay our employees, buy supplies, pay rent, and find out our profits. Sometimes there were fines and sometimes there were bonuses. Eventually, we got to decide which boxes we wanted to have in our store so we could sell more and not have so many leftover. There was a lot of teamwork, braincell building, and fun. That's what's happening in 5th grade math! Bea and Katherine. 

Just so you know, DIRT stands for Daily Independent Reading Time. That is what we call our year-long reading project in Tim's room. It is tough to finish but we know it can be done. In DIRT, you will read 7 books. It will be one book from each genre in our classroom library which includes: Mystery, Historical Fiction, Animal, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Sports, Friendship and Growing Up, and Adventure. Tim even does it! This project also includes lots of peer reviews, exit interviews, book reviews, and book chats. Peer reviews are where you meet with a friend to talk about the book. Exit interviews are when you meet with Tim about the book while book reviews are like a book report. A book chat is when you do a presentation in front of the class. The presentation has a visual aid so you could do: a poster, write a letter to the author, create a comic strip, construct a map about the book, build a scene using legos, make a book trailer, craft badges for the characters, and more.  We are...