A Five Day Week?

I hope everyone is shoveled out by now. Due to our snow days last week, we ended up having a little break in the middle of our week. It sounds like everyone had a great time though and I have to say that I definitely enjoyed it as well. This week we are back to a full week. We will be spending it making up some activities from last week and also forging ahead to new things. Here are some important things for this week:

It's Everybody Counts Week! Everybody Counts is a program designed to teach children about various disabilities and how children with these challenges cope with them. It also helps children understand that they don't have to be the best at everything to still be worthwhile and important. The goal is understanding; to help everyone know the person behind the disability and to create a climate in which we all feel at ease with one another's differences. On Friday, our kids will have the opportunity to learn what it is like to have a disability or condition. They will experience a presentation that will provide the children with an opportunity to experience what it would be like to cope with a disability.

Valentine's Day is coming up! Our kids will be celebrating on Monday, February 14th in the afternoon. A note went home on Monday that included reminders for the day as well as a list of the students in our class. We have 22 kids this year-- 11 boys and 11 girls. Please remember that if candy is included in your valentine, it must be wrapped and will not be consumed at school. A list including items that will be served at our party will be sent home later this week.

STARS lunch for students who turned in all of their homework for the month of January will be on Thursday. Invitations for students who made the lunch went home on Monday. Please remember all lunches brought to the LMC that day need to be peanut and tree nut free.

Six Flags Six Hour Reading Club was handed out today. This is an optional program that invites all kids in grades kindergarten through sixth to read for fun. Every student who completes six hours of recreational reading by Friday, February 25th can earn a free admission ticket valid at participating Six Flags theme parks! No late entries will be taken this year. Specific instructions about the program can be found stapled to your child's reading log.

Our theme this week in reading actually goes along with Everybody Counts week. We are talking this week about creative solutions. We will discuss people that have faced challenges due to disabilities and have overcome them with wisdom, technology, and perseverance. We will use fiction and nonfiction passages to help us draw conclusions about character traits and actions.

Our spelling lists this week deal with changing "y" to "i" and adding on an ending such as -ed, -es, -er, -est, and -ly. The kids took a pretest on Monday and received their spelling list for the week. The word sort and 2 menu items are due on Friday.

In grammar we continue to work with pronouns. This week our focus in on subject/object pronouns, as well as reflexive pronouns.

The kids are working to prove character traits through a character's action in writing. We will also work with sequencing moments to connect events in time, as well as showing cause and effect in our writing. They are doing a great job using excerpts from our read aloud book, "In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" to explain their thinking about the main character, Shirley.

We finished some work with conductors and insulators on Monday. The rest of the week in science we will work with series and parallel circuits. We will also talk about Samuel Morse and his famous code. The kids will work to create their own switches on Friday using what they have learned about circuits so far! We are having a great time experimenting with electricity!

In math we practiced measuring and drawing angles with a full circle protractor on Monday. We will also experiment with half-circle protractors throughout the week and review words such as vertex, acute, right, and obtuse. The remainder of the week will be spent using rectangular coordinate grids and global coordinate grids (latitude and longitude). We will try to do 3 mad minutes test this week to make up for missed tests last week.

A new Scholastic catalog will come home on Tuesday. All orders for February are due by Friday, February 18th. Feel free to either order online or send in your order. Directions for both formats can be found on the sheet attached to your child's catalog.

You will notice an addition in your child's reading log. While the kids are still required to read 4-5 times a week, they will also be completing a weekly mini-book response. These are all one page questions that will have your child practice making connections, explaining his/her thinking, and using strategies we have practiced so far this year in class. This will allow me to learn a bit more about what he/she is reading and give him/her a chance to practice all the great responding we have been doing so far in class. A rubric for how your child will be graded is included right on the response sheet. Both the reading log and mini-book response will be due on Mondays.

I think that covers everything for now. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact me! Have a great week and stay warm!