Opportunities to be LEADERS!

Going home today are two more ways your student can be a leader at Creekside. I'm very excited to announce that we will be choosing two representatives for Student Leadership Council on Wednesday! If your student is interested in running for "office", they got an information sheet with instructions for Wednesday's speech and general info about being on Student Leadership Council. We will choose one boy and one girl based on their speeches on Wednesday. Good luck to all who are going to participate!

Is math your student's favorite subject? If so, Math Olympiad might be for him/her! Mrs. Tasa will be leading the team this year, teaching the kids additional math topics and guiding them through complex team problem solving. The Olympiad itself is in May, until then kids will be meeting every Tuesday after school to get ready. Mrs. Tasa also needs parent volunteers to make this great enrichment program work, so if you are interested please indicate that on your child's permission form.

Links to Math Letters

As we are moving on to our next unit in math, I am reminded that I said I was going to add links to download the family math letters for each unit. The district, (thank goodness!) has already done the work for me! To the right, you'll see a new section for "Links" which includes one for the district download page.

Field Trip Photos!!!

I set up a slide show to the right with our photos from Tuesday. If you click the slideshow, it opens up our Picasa album where you can download the photos for your own use, enjoy!

We had a GREAT time, the weather couldn't have been any more perfect, and I think they learned alot. Thank you to Anne Rosauer for being a great chaperone, and a huge thanks to the kids; they were shining examples of how Creekside Otters act on field trips!

Field Trip Tomorrow!!!

Very important, DON'T FORGET!!!

-Arrive by 7:50
-Meet in covered basketball area
-Bring a lunch and water bottle in your own backpack
-Wear layers (in the 50's in the AM, but will warm up a bit)
-Please, please, PLEASE leave the electronic devices at home...I've seen a cell phone go over the side when kids were taking pictures and got bumped...
-ARRIVE BY 7:50!!

We will be back to school by 3:10, so you can take your regular transportation home.

Summary practice!


As part of working with the reading strategy of "summarizing text", let's have some fun summarizing our favorite movies! Remember the key questions to ask yourself as you write a summary:


What is this selection about?
What are the main ideas of this selection? What is your evidence?
What is not important to remember in this selection? Why?


A good summary covers the "W's" of a selection, WHO (are the main characters), WHAT (did they do?), WHERE (does the selection primarily take place), WHEN (does the selection take place), and WHY (did the characters do what they did? Think about the theme of the selection).


Guidelines for this first invitation to respond to our blog:
-For this response, "selection" refers to the movie you have selected to summarize
-School appropriate language at all times
-Choose a movie that is also school appropriate (I'm sure Jaws III is a wonderful movie, but...). Use G and PG rated movies as a rule of thumb.


Most of all, have fun! I think it will be fun to see if there are movies we haven't seen before and might want to based on our classmates' summaries!

Planners

This also goes under "oops, Mrs. Alexander has too many things to juggle right now...". I completely forgot to talk about the cost of the planners at curriculum night, which is $5, payable to Creekside ASB. Sorry about that!

A big OOPS! on the field trip date!

The 5th grade had our classes divided up so that Mr. Pollock and Ms. Sullivan could attend a training day on Monday...problem is, that training day is actually Tuesday! This means our class will be attending Marine Science Afloat TUESDAY OCT 12th instead of Monday, Oct 11. For those of you who have submitted chaperone interest notes, if this affects your ability to attend, please let me know.

Welcome to our FINAL web presence!

I jumped the gun choosing to use TeacherWeb, and now I'm paying for it (literally!). I'm finding that similar to the "Connect" web presence that Issaquah uses, TeacherWeb was clunky and not user friendly. This format, however, IS very user friendly...and very KID USER friendly! That's to say, I want our students to eventually be the authors of this blog/website's content. Again, this is a work in progress, so please excuse the sand and seaweed as we build our site together!

Things to note:

-I'm still fiddling with the comment section. My hope was to have it be members only, but that requires all families to have a google account, and I don't want to make that a requirement. I think for now, I'll leave it on the setting where I have to approve comments so that I can ensure that they are from either parents or students. Comments made by people other than Creekside staff, my students, or their parents will not be posted. That said, please take a moment to read through Issaquah's Acceptable Use policy.

-There is a daily homework page that will display the last three week's homework assignments. This was not possible in TeacherWeb or Connect, but was one of the most important features of my last website.