Above the Line

Exchange City

Over the break, one of our classmates visited Ciudad de los Ninos in Mexico City. It is a reenactment of a life-sized city, where kids can have jobs, drive cars, and earn money. It sounds amazing!

I did some research and found out that the company that runs this place is called KidZania, and they have other locations in many places around the world, including Asia and Europe. You can read about the company here. Unfortunately, they don't have any locations in the United States.

Mr. Bluestein did some research, too. He found a place called Exchange City that is the same type of place. There is one in Missouri and another one in Rhode Island.

You can watch a video of Exchange City below.

Leave a comment if you'd like to visit Exchange City! What would you most want to do there?

If we were to run a city like this at Gillispie, how might we do that? And what would ours be called?

Thankfulness Project

Before you begin this assignment, please read all of the directions below.

1. In your Google Drive, make a new document.

2. Copy and paste the list of your classmates names into this document.

3. For each person, write a sentence or two saying something you appreciate about that person. Be kind, be sincere, and be specific. You must use the person's name in your sentence.

4. When you finish, re-read everything you wrote. Make corrections, as needed.

5. Name your document. Then, share your document with me: hlong@gillispie.org.

Here is the list of your classmates:

Amelia
Celeste
Colin
Cyrus
Deanne Paola
Gabrielle
Jack
Justin
Max
Maxwell
Natalia
Nicola
Raj
Rex

Adding Mixed Numbers with Khan Academy

Check out this video from Khan Academy on how to add mixed numbers.

Then, complete pages 109-112 in your workbook. You may work on your own or with a partner. When you finish, try one of the practice activities for this skill in Khan Academy.

Prime Factorization with Khan Academy

Check out this video from Khan Academy on how to write ANY number as the product of primes! Bonus: Refresher on prime vs. not prime and introduction to exponents.

Learning Dialogue with Mr. Seahorse!

In fifth grade, students include dialogue in their writing. Eric Carle's Mr. Seahorse provides some examples of how to correctly punctuate different sentence types within dialogue. Take a look!

The first sentence shows how to punctuate a statement:

"It's time for me to lay my eggs," she said.

Notice that the sentence ends with comma, instead of a period, which is placed inside the quotation marks. Also, the next word is not capitalized.



The next bit of dialogue is a question:

"Can I help?" asked Mr. Seahorse.

Notice that the question mark goes inside the quotation marks and the following word is NOT capitalized.



Next up is an exclamation:

"Oh, yes. Thank you!" said Mrs. Seahorse.

It has an exclamation point inside the quotation marks, and it is followed by a lower case letter.



The final example is the trickiest one!  This is a type of dialogue where the description of who ssaid it interrupts the dialogue:

I'll take good care of our eggs," said Mr. Seahorse, "I promise."

Notice that there is a comma after the first part of the statement and a comma after the name of the person who spoke. This is also how you introduce a bit of dialogue.

For example:

Mrs. Long said, "Check back here if you need an example of how to punctuate dialogue."

Transition Words

One of the goals for fifth grade writing is to include transition words in our writing. Here is a list of helpful words to get you started!