I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break! Hopefully everyone had their share of family, friends, food, sleep, and fun! A huge THANK YOU to Mrs. Buck for everything over these first few months! She will be very missed by students and staff! Thank you also to everyone for taking time to come in for conferences last week. It was a great opportunity to talk about the successes of your child. These next few weeks always go by fast since we have so much going on. Here is a look at our week ahead:
* If you haven't already done so, please return the brown report card envelope. We will reuse these for trimesters to come. Everything inside the report card envelope can stay home, we only need the envelope back.
* In reading, we will be taking some reading inventories to get to know our styles and interests. We will do some more work with our reading binders as well. The kids will make new goals for themselves and begin doing daily reading responses about their free reading book. We will continue to use the nonfiction strategies that we worked with during the first trimester. We will also begin to work with more fiction stories and begin to do an in-depth study of character.
* The kids finished their final draft of their personal narrative in WEX. We will now work on some letter writing. The students will review format, paragraphing, and conventions. We will begin by writing friendly letters to people in our class and then venture into writing opinion/persuasive letters to companies or organizations.
* In grammar we will review the difference between plural and possessive nouns. The kids are becoming aware of how important an apostrophe can be!
* We continue to work on our Native American project in social studies. The kids gained a wealth of information from our field trip to the Mitchell Museum before break. We will now be wrapping up our research by looking for quality websites. The kids will then take this information and create their own website about their region.
* In addition to the Native American project, we also began our geography unit in History Alive. We reviewed hemispheres, oceans, continents, longitude and latitude before break. This week we will review some geographic terms for both water and land (ie: bay, mountain range, gulf, plain) and move into some physical features of the United States (ie: Rocky Mountain, Great Plains, etc). The students will receive a study guide over this material mid-week and we will take a quiz over these on Friday or next Monday--we will see how the week goes and how comfortable the students are with the material.
* In math we are busy moving our way through Unit 4. This week we will work with estimating decimals, adding/subtracting decimals, decimals in money (bank balances), and working with decimals in the thousandths. We will also begin a daily problem solving program in class which will help the kids begin to show their work and try different strategies to get to an answer.
* Don't forget our genre this month for free reading is historical fiction! Hopefully everyone has a book and is on their way to reading!
* I think that covers everything! Thanks so much for your patience as I get my bearings in the classroom again. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know!
