After we saw Van Meter and Brook Forest’s book suggestions for incoming 5th graders, our teacher decided we would do the same thing. We made recommendations for summer reading as well as for books kids should read during 5th grade. Here are the books we recommend that rising 5th graders should read during the summer – but they could also read them when they are in 5th grade!
Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Al Capone does my Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko
Danny the Champion of the Word by Roald Dahl
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright – “This is fun and interesting with a lot of adventure. It is also set in NYC, but in a very different time. It is very well written, and is in the appropriate season!”
The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg
The Boy Who Saved Baseball by John H. Ritter – “I love baseball, which is just a small reason I like this book. It is also told from the perspective of a quiet, thoughtful character who has a lot to say about the things going on. This book goes up and down, and you never quite know where it is going.”
We hope you enjoy our suggestions. If you have ideas about other books rising 5th graders should read, please comment here on our blog! We have a whole other set of books we think kids should read in 5th grade. Our teacher is going to post them at the beginning of the next school year.
Have a great summer! We are all going to!
5A Tech-taters 2010-2011
On Friday May 20, our class represented the ancient greek city-state Sparta in our 5th grade version of the Olympics. We competed in a full day group of events.
The events were:
4×100 relay
4×200 relay
Shotput
Discus
Long Jump
800m run
80m sprint
400m walk
We came second in the olympics and everyone in the whole class did great and had lots of fun. Here are some photo slideshows our awesome teacher made.
Our school decided as a community that we wanted to help Japan after the devastating earthquakes and tsunami, and particularly wanted to help Japan’s children. We found out about a program where for every paper crane (origami folded cranes) that we made by 25th April, OshKosh would send an item of children’s clothing to Japan. We set our target at 1000. A few teachers knew how to fold the cranes, and we invited one to come to our class to teach us how to make them. The first time, it was really difficult to follow the directions but Ms. Kim was very patient with us and we took our time. We made 13 cranes (one each) that day. Over the weekend, Catherine got together with some friends, taught them how to fold cranes, and on Monday she came in with about 35 cranes in a bag! From then on, our class were off! Many students in our class gave up recess time to go to make cranes in the art studio, and would take home paper from the classroom to make them after school and bring them in. We made hundreds! By the 25th of April, the day of the final count, we were ecstatic – we had not only reached our target of 1000, but we had more than quadrupled it!! Yes, our final total was 4927 cranes. That is almost 5000 items of clothing for OshKosh to send to Japan. Great work everyone!!
In New York, spring is springing. It has just started to get around 70˚ F (21˚ C) and it hasn’t dropped for three days! I am lucky to live a block away from a park where there is always something surprising or fun going on, and is usually bursting with color in the spring. I decided to go on a special outing in celebration of the arrival of spring.
As you can tell from my majestic language, I am excited.
My outing was a photo outing. I tucked my two year old Kodak into my pocket, and headed out the door and downstairs to the lobby. I was happily surprised to see that the tree outside my building was in full bloom, but stupidly I did not take a picture. Finally I arrived at the park, and the first thing I saw was a display of yellow, orange, pink, and purple flowers. Here are the pictures I took of those.
I took some other pictures on my photo outing, which I will reveal too.
This is an art installation up in the park, and I thought it was really pretty. This picture almost looks fake, doesn’t it? The sculpture is a little crazy, but there is always odd art up in that circle. Do you like it?
That is one of my favorites. There are two more that I like, here they are.
This tree was an outlier, because it was the only one around that had absolutely no blooms. This picture is kind of dramatic, maybe it has something to do with the gray sky…
Last one. Here goes…
I don’t exactly know how this one came up, maybe when I got a little thirsty .
I love taking photographs, and the park was just so perfect today. I am lobbying for my parents to get a family Nikon fancy camera, but for now I am using my nice little Kodak which I got two years ago for my birthday. And by the way, none of these were edited.
Is spring springing where you are? Are you excited? I hope you are inspired to go out and take your camera!
A few days ago we had the Day of Silence. The Day of Silence is a day where you choose a certain period of time to be silent. We did this for the gay and lesbian kids that are getting bullied. When people think of bullying they usually think of kids making fun of other kids because they are not so smart or short or other reasons. But this day is for kids getting picked on because they are gay or lesbian. Our class chose a period of time to be silent, I chose for 9:30 to 12:00. Us, 5D and 3A participated in this event to bring attention to the fact that gay and lesbian kids in schools and colleges get bullied because of who they are. We are going to work with 3A on a proposal to try and get this to be our whole school participating next year.
My class is participating in a project called the postcard project! Yesterday we trooped out in the rain to go ‘shopping!’ for postcards. After cramming six by six into the stationary story we each chose two postcards. Over the next few weeks we will write them and send them all over the world, here is the list of the countries we will send them to:
Australia
Canada
England
New Zealand
Russia
Scotland
United States
Italy
We will write another blogpost when we receive a postcard!
After a spring break with sunny days, rainy days and not much warm weather, we come back to school. We all catch up on what happened over spring break, some people went away maybe even got a tan. Some stayed in the city and some went somewhere else. There were a few days when I could take off my jacket and exclaim ‘it is so hot today’. Or some people got a new family member. After all of the catching up we have to clear out all of the cobwebs in our brains and start to get back into the groove of waking up early, studying for our tests and doing our homework at night. I was looking forward to coming back to school after two boring weeks of doing nothing. You may think that staying at home for that long is fun really it isn’t.
We are almost done writing our “This I Believe” essay in class. With a maximum amount of words at 500, and the minimum amount of words at 400 we are writing quite a few paragraphs. As the teacher says, the amount of words doesn’t matter it’s the quality that counts. Most of our essays are about the values we believe in. Some values people are writing about include being truthful or being kind, it all depends on what you believe in. Most of us have a story to base on why we believe in something. I can’t wait till we finish our essays. Maybe when we finish our essays we can write more about them.
Our first game off to a good start. We played Saint Thomas Choir and crushed them, we played them later as our fourth game. At the end of the season almost everybody had scored. Our team won all of our games we had loads of fun. With a lot of practice, some ups and downs, and with a little bit of luck we won the season finale in overtime. Everyone improved all around, attitude and skill. Our team started off a bunch of hopeful 5th graders who became into champions. Half of the games we played were against 6th graders, so we had a disadvantage, but we pulled through. We played in a tournament and lost all three games, but all of which were to the toughest teams. To close up the season of wins, laughter, soda, and pizza, we scrimmaged our schools 6th grade team. It was played at Columbia College for a halftime show, the 5th grade lost off of some fast breaks, but who cares, it is all about having fun. A great season, 7 wins and 0 losses, looking forward to lacrosse season, and can’t wait till next year!
Just this week (after coming back from a very restful spring break) we started a new maths project. We are designing our own bicycle race course! First we decided how long we wanted to make our course. Then we had to figure out where the water, food, resting, (let’s not forget the bathroom), and signs were going to be on our bike course. Now, we couldn’t just choose them randomly because if we put all the water at the beginning, and the food at the end, you might get kind of hungry while in the middle. So we had to space them perfectly evenly, maybe you would have a food station every 1/4 of the track. And then we had to figure out how far that would be on your course, and where they would be. And then you are ready to make the race! We had a two day race, if you were in it you would bike to the end of the track, sleep in a hotel for the night, and be ready to start fresh in the morning. And after all that, then you can design how you want your race course to look. Let the race begin!
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