Happy New Year!

Happy 2011! I hope you all had a great break and holiday -- it always amazes me how fast the time off goes. Here's a look at the week ahead:

Our theme in reading is "Kids Get it Done". We will use nonfiction text to compare and contrast information about kids doing service projects and reporting news about improving he lives of children. The kids will also start work in small novel groups during the later part of the week.

The kids will take a pretest on Monday to determine their spelling list for the week. We will work with words that have the soft /c/ and /g/ sound. Each child will be required to do a word sort for their list and then 1-2 spelling grid activities. These activities will be due on Friday.

In grammar we will look at main and helping verbs. We will also be reviewing contractions and how to correctly punctuate contractions.

We will continue to work with the book "The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" in writing. The kids will work to analyze characters and settings. They will practice putting themselves in the main character's shoes and writing about how their life would be different.

We will spend time reviewing double digit multiplication in math. We will also work with exponents and naming/writing large numbers using patterns in the base-ten place value system. The children will work with rounding these large numbers and comparing data as well. We will finish Unit 5 this week and will spend the first part of next week reviewing and testing our knowledge over this unit.

In science we will begin our unit on electricity! This week we will learn about atoms, make a model of an atom, and do some experimenting with static electricity.

It's that time of year again---cold and flu season (yuck!). We will clean our desks off more often during the winter months. If you are able to donate some Clorox wipes (not Greenworks), that would be great! I will be looking for more to buy as well. Hopefully this will be a healthy year for all of us!

I hope you all had a great break and I look forward to catching up with the kids this week. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! Happy 2011!