A Peek at My Week!

It's been a while since I liked up with Jennifer at Mrs.Laffin's Laughings for A Peek at My Week! This week are starting all new units! We only had a three day work week last week due to the Polar Vortex and extreme cold. We introduced some new units but didn't really get "started"... so this week, we're digging deep and getting our new units!

We started our next novel! We're going to be reading The Tale of Despeareux. It's one of my favorite books to do as a read aloud with the kids. Plus if you haven't heard the audiobook version... OMG! It's my favorite audiobook! My students beg for the "man on the CD." He does all the voices and has a fantastic accent. Adore this book and all the characters. The lessons we're doing come from Lucy Calkin's fifth grade suggested calendar from her book A Curricular Plan for Reading Workshop Grade 5.

We're staring our Argumentative Essay unit! This is my favorite writing unit of the year! Fifth graders are very persuasive. Students made construction paper folders to hold their research notes and choose topics this past week. Starting Monday, students will be learning different ways to take research notes on a topic. Then they will be reading both sides of their argument as well this week and then choosing a stance. Since we're already practiced gathering research for our feature articles, we choose six topics for our students to research and collected credible articles for text sets to save some time!

We started our Latin America unit last week with some mapping practice. Now, we're ready to learn about the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs!

The Ancient Civilizations for Children series is fantastic introduction to each cultural group. These were a great find at my local library! We plan to end our week watching the movie, The Road to El Dorado where students have to decide if the mythical tribe in the movie is the Maya, Inca, or Aztec. Bonus: The movie was only $5 dollars on Amazon!

Can't wait to see what everyone else is up to this week!