The Adventures in Mrs. Ripp's Room

Special Notes –

*Reminder:  Glacier Creek 5^th grade parent night is this coming Tuesday, May 21^st 6:30 – 7:30 PM in the school cafetorium.  This is a great night for information regarding middle school student development, their school program, basic school contact information, and parent questions.

*  Time to return books to the school and classroom library.  Please help your child look for books that need to be handed in, I am missing a lot of books.

*   For graduation, students are being asked to wear their tie-dye shirt or West Middleton shirt.  An invitation will be going home soon.

*  New on our website: a video of the egg drop build,  student reading plan survey, video of students working on biomes.

* In class talent show will be next Friday.  Unfortunately parents are not invited as we are doing it for our 1^st grade buddies as well as two kindergarten classes.  I will post a video of it later. 

*  The final week of our box tops and food drive is next week.  Please send in anything you can donate.

* I have some dates for you to put on your calendars:, Tangle of the Titles May 21^st 1 PM,  Talent Show Friday, May 24^th 1:45 PM, No school Monday, May 27^th,  Orchestra performance Wednesday, May 29^th 2 PM, Lock Out June 5^th all day, 5^th Grade Graduation June 7^th 1:30 PM in lunch room.

Math – The final unit of the year will be wrapped up next week with the test scheduled For Wednesday.  It has been wonderful to see the mathematical concepts taught throughout the year come together to form new meaning.    After that we will hopefully start the teapot project.    

Science – We were busy building our egg drop contraptions, check out the video of the build on our website.  A video from the actual egg drop will be recorded and posted on our website as well.  As always the ingenuity of the students was wonderful and especially those that realized midway through the build that their device would fail and then changed it.  Most of our plants are also growing quite a bit, these students have a green thumb for sure.

Social Studies –  We also started our simulation, “How a Bill becomes A Law,” with students acting as both concerned citizens and the government.  President Billy got to nominate 3 Supreme Court Judges and we now start to draft our bills.  The students also played constitutional games on ICivics.org – fantastic website that is free and open to play – wonderful fun. 

Writing – Great blogging this week on Innovation day.  A new challenge will be posted later today.  I hope to have students print out all of their kidblog entries and create a journal of their year, as their accounts will be deleted come August.  We started our first draft of memoir yesterday and will continue working with it until the end.

Special Notes –

* Thank you to all of you who made food for us Wednesday in honor of teacher appreciation week, it was very delicious.

* Innovation Day was amazing!  I will put together a video of it in the coming week.  We will do a gallery walk presentation to show off all of our projects; it is always quite incredible to see what the students create.

* Don’t forget to send in pictures for the graduation bulletin board.

*  What a rainy day at the track meet but the kids did phenomenal.  They really made me so proud!  Pictures have been posted on our website.

*  Don’t forget to take the end of the year survey, link is on our website or ask for a paper copy.

*  Talent show slips should be sent in to me ASAP.  I am excited to see the kids perform.

* Final book order due today – get them in now for summer reading!

 * I have some dates for you to put on your calendars: Sub all day May 15^th, Egg Drop Friday, May 17^th at 2 PM (we are putting Mr. Jerry on the roof!), Tangle of the Titles May 21^st 1 PM,  Talent Show Friday, May 24^th 1:45 PM, No school Monday, May 27^th,  Orchestra performance Wednesday, May 29^th 2 PM, Lock Out June 5^th all day, 5^th Grade Graduation June 7^th 1:30 PM in lunch room.

Math – We finished unit 11 this week and start our final unit today.  All of my math kids will stay with me for this unit with the test scheduled for May 23^rd right now.  Then we do the teapot project for a few weeks if all goes well.

Science – The plants have sprouted and the students are pretty excited about it.  We have also continued our work on our biome project, I love hearing the discussion of how students will teach this or that concept to their fellow students.    Next week it is also all about the egg drop, which will take place Friday at 2:00 PM by sticking Mr. Jerry on the kindergarten roof.  We can’t wait!

Social Studies – We have been busy discussing the Constitution as well as its amendments.  Next week we will vote for president as we start our law simulation.

Reading – Reading has been limited this week with MAP testing , Innovation day and track meet.

Writing – We have done very little writing in writing this week due to all of the other things we had going on.  However, the students reacted to a video by Suli Breaks on their blogs, if you have not seen the video you should take a moment to watch it, it is very powerful.