We are roaring to go as March’s winds and April’s showers bring in new learning experiences for us. As a fifth grade this year we have been invited to go to our county’s outdoor education facility known as Harford Glen. We will be spending four days and three nights there learning about the importance of the balance in Nature and how to be caretaker’s of our environment.

This will take place in April, the 15 through the 18^th. We are greatly looking forward to this learning experience. We will be putting all the things we’ve learned in our environmental issues unit to work. Please remember the money for the cost of the food is due one week before we leave, and make the check payable to our school. Harford Glen’s website is: www.hcps.org/harfordglen. You may visit this site for more detail information.

March in our reading classrooms finds us deep into reading informational text and developing reading strategies that help us comprehend this type of text.  We have also been learning how important visualizing is and what we think about as we read. We have also been focusing on our prior knowledge about what we read .This helps us make better connections that help us comprehend at a higher level of understanding.  We are truly thinking hard about what we read to be better prepared to take the MSA.

In math we are reviewing math concepts and skills to be better prepared for it also.

In science we are finishing our exciting unit titled, Energy Around Us. In this unit we did several experiments that dealt with creating an electric closed circuit that allows electrons to flow freely to conduct their energy to light a small light buld.  We also learned a lot about magnets and how this force is present inside our Earth called gravity. This keeps us from flying off into space.  One big idea we learned about energy is that we can’t create it or destroy it, but we can harness it to work for us. We also learned about eight different forms of energy: Solar, Thermal, Atomic, Chemical, Nuclear, Mechanical, Electrical, and Light.

Our next unit in science is, Elements of Life. In this unit we will learn how to use a compound microscope to look at the invisible world that we cannot see just with our eyes. We will explore what the cell actually looks like and learn how our bodies are made up of special cells that form organs.

In social studies we are in pursuit of understanding what happened in early English settlements like Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth.  We are also investigating what colonial life was like in America.  In February we had a chance to watch our classmates share their work on presenting small commercials about persuading people to come to the New World from Europe. That was fun!

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