Hello!
The district Spelling Bee was held on Dec 6th and it was an exciting event. Several of the EY students participated, and all of the contestants made it through the written round into the oral competition. Dylan from Prairie Lane took 3rd place in the Elementary Division. Great job spellers! For those who has a passion for spelling, or would like to get a start studying for next year, www.spellingcity.com and http://www.myspellit.com are fun resources to check out.
We have started the district elementary Geography bees. All students were given a quiz and the top students from each building will participate in the bee. There are some great geography games @ http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/games/geographygames/
During our reading EY times, we have moved on from the strategy theme and are on to communication. We have been discussing several literary devices, enriching what they are also learning in the classroom. This involves the creative side of their brains, which is fun to see. We have some that really are able to think outside the box, for others it is a bit of a stretch. But it is always good to step outside of your comfort zone now and then. We are continuing to do Wordly Wise each week, and it is fun to play with the words and the meanings.
We completed our first Math Olympiad competition in late November. This is a test we take in class each month from November to March. I was impressed with the scores and enjoyed listening to the strategies for solving the problems. We took the second one this week and will go over strategies to solve the problems next week.
The grade 5 and 6 mathclub students worked on handshake math problems recently.
Seven mathematicians met up one week.
The first mathematician shook hands with all the others.
The second one shook hands with all the others apart from the first one (since they had already shaken hands).
The third one shook hands with all the others apart from the first and the second mathematicians, and so on, until everyone had shaken hands with everyone else.
How many handshakes were there altogether?
We learned that we can make on organized list or make a table to find a pattern
We also talked about drawing a diagram or acting it out. We decided if there were a few people in the room, all of these would work great, but when the number of people increased, these strategies would take too long. A a group, we worked on a formula to solve these types of problems and decided that we would use 
As an extension, we worked out how to find the number of diagonals in a polygon using a similar formula
Here are some online math contest practice sites to try out!
http://mathtop10.com/5th_grade_math_challenge_free/5th_grade_math_competition%20P1.htm
http://www.brocku.ca/caribou/test/practice_test_login.php
Please let me know if you have questions or concerns.
Jenny