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
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!!
What a wonderful performance! 5A – you did an incredible job, and I was so proud of you. Everyone has been working so hard on these projects so it was wonderful for you to share them with your families. It was great to see you put just as much enthusiasm into re-doing the performance for the K-5 assembly later in the afternoon. I think you enjoyed dancing to the music at the end of assembly as much as all the rest combined! Maybe a dance party in the classroom is in order. One day. Maybe.
On our recent overnight trip to Black Rock Forest, one of the activities the kids could choose from was photography. I was the teacher doing the photography activity, and what I decided to have the kids focus on (haha) was looking at the forest and seeing what caught their attention, and then trying to photograph it with a different perspective in mind. “Be prepared to put your body on the line,” I told them. I also suggested they think of themselves as an insect – what perspective of the forest might that insect have? I wanted them to consider the forest from different angles and try to capture the unusual. After each group spent some time wandering in the forest, they uploaded their photographs to the laptops and wrote out some words that their photos made them think of. I then had them choose their favorite 8-10 photos to create a video with using the Animoto site. It is easy to use, and looks great. Below you will see the video created by Clara, a student in my class.
Woohoo! We have been processed and regained our edublogs pro status – letting us remove the ads and get our voki, shelfari and other widgets back! Thanks for bearing with us while we waited during the processing time. Look for a post about some musicians visiting our school.
For those of you returning to our blog, you might notice some things that are different than usual! You will notice an advert at the top, and that our voki, visitor live update and shelfari widgets are not appearing as they are supposed to. The reason for this is that we had a pro edublogs account that I organized last year, and wasn’t able to update before it expired. I have now ‘re-upped’ for another year, and once it is processed our blog will look like it’s old self again! Please bear with us until then
Ms. G
We took photographs of different spaces in our school, and Claire and Catherine created a movie using Animoto. We take up 6 floors of a building in Manhattan, and our playspace is on the roof!
Welcome to the blog of 5A! We are going to write about what we are learning and thinking about in our class. We are 5th graders living in New York City. This year we are going to be studying the ancient civilizations of China and Greece. First we are learning about how archaeologists learn about life in the past by examining artifacts.
There are only 12 students in our class – it’s probably the smallest class in our school! We have a small classroom though, so we wouldn’t fit many more kids in! This year our teacher is trying out some new things – one is a standing desk that has a swing bar. If you are a fidgety type of kid you would probably really like it. You can be swinging your leg while you are doing your work, and you wouldn’t be distracting anyone else. Something else we are trying out this year are yoga balls. We have 3 in our room, and we can switch our regular chair for the yoga ball.
Please come back and read more about what we are doing!
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