Our first day in fifth grade was a success! We welcomed several new faces to our class this year. It is going to be a fantastic year with this group of students and we are all excited for the year ahead!

We got right down to business this morning, first reviewing expectations for our GT&E classroom. We used one of our favorite SMART tools, Shout it Out, to gather ideas. Students brainstormed not only expectations for students in our room, but expectations for Mrs. Schropp as well. What a great reminder to kick off our time together.

As part of our first day, we introduced Google Classroom to our new students and got everyone signed up for our virtual classroom. We love our iPads and Chromebooks and feel very blessed for the opportunity to use them on a daily basis. We love technology! Parents, Mrs. Schropp introduced our first-day homework assignment, of which the directions can be found in our Google Classroom. Please ask your child all about it.

Next, we jumped right into the learning! To introduce the big idea of our day we interpreted a quote about intelligence by the inspirational freedom activist and thinker, Vinoba Bhave. We also reflected on our own perspectives, defining the meaning of intelligence in our own words.

Mrs. Schropp surprised us with strips of paper containing lines of a poem all jumbled up. Our job was to arrange the lines in a way that made the most sense to us. Each partner group created a title for their arrangement and shared the big idea of their final product with the class. Knowing we were all given the same lines, it was very interesting to hear the different perspectives as we looked for patterns in our thinking.

At the end of class, Mrs. Schropp revealed that the strips of paper were lines from the poem, Two Kinds of Intelligence, by Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi. We are looking forward to analyzing this powerful poem next week, along with our technology assignment that will tie everything together. Watch for more to come!

Recently, our fifth grade class used  couple of SMART lab activities to think about various characteristics. First, we used “Rank Order” to rank 10 character traits based on their importance. As a group, we agreed this was a challenging task because we thought all of the traits listed were important to have. After ranking our traits, each group used “Shout it Out!” to share our final order with the class. Each group had an opportunity to explain their thinking and group perspective with the class. At the end of the activity, Mrs. Schropp asked us to look for trends that we noticed in the rankings. What trends do you see?

 Mrs. Schropp then introduced us to our final project for the year. We are busy creating our very own digital philosophy books. Stay tuned to see our final products!