I love when completely different things come together and create the perfect theme to a week.
This week in Social Studies we were in the country of India. The entire class was interested in this magnificent country and had so many questions. I love that the class is always so inspired and interested in every single country we study. They appreciate the diversity of the world and are always amazed by its beauty.
We also talked about Dr. Martin Luther King and watched his I Have a Dream speech together in class. After listening to his incredible speech, we were inspired to write down our own dreams. The bulletin board outside my classroom is beautifully decorated with the dreams of each fifth grader for our world. I was moved to tears as I was reading each one of them. This class has incredible dreamers that make a difference each day.
The class has been so excited to start preparing for the school spelling bee during Catholic Schools Week. We received our classroom competition list and the class wanted to get the process started. To help inspire the future champions in our class, I played the documentary Spelling the Dream for them. This documentary followed four Indian-American kids who hope for success in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It also gives some history about how the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 encouraged Indians to move to the United States for opportunities. The entire class was amazed by these young kids that are just like them. One of my favorite moments of the documentary included a quote from a former spelling bee champion:
After watching the documentary, we were motivated to get to practicing for our our classroom spelling bee. The top two in our class will move on the school competition during Catholic Schools Week. We grabbed our study materials and hopped onto the Merriam-Webster website and began our research. We looked up the words that we were unfamiliar with and were able to hear the pronunciation, find out the origin, see the definition, and how it can be used in a sentence. Our class competition will be on Wednesday… I have a feeling it will be a long and tough process to get to the final two!
I hope to see you tonight at the FAST sledding event! Have a great weekend!
~Mrs. A
PS- Here is a picture from Mass today! Calla and Emalyne were the first fifth graders to enter into the server rotation for our weekly school Mass. They did amazing!
