Monday is October 1st! The month of September has flown by.  Beginning on Monday, students will be assigned  20 minutes of  reading every night.  The 20 minutes may be from pages I assign or from independently chosen books.  The books should be appropriate for your child's reading ability.Reading everyday is so important for success in school and beyond!
   Our next "question of the week" is about how people meet their needs and wants.  We'll be looking at how individuals, communities and nations fulfill needs and wants through the interaction of citizens, cultures, and industries.
   In Math we'll begin a new topic which includes number sense with addition and subtraction, rounding and estimation.
   I'll post the new spelling and vocabulary lists on Monday.
Have a great weekend!

Thanks to everyone who came to Back to School Night. It was a pleasure to see you all. For anyone who couldn't make it, I'll send home the information that was given out.  In a nutshell, we talked about the level of rigor in new ELA standards, looked at the materials in our ELA and math series, discussed the new snack regulations, our daily schedule, and when we will begin practicing cursive.  Please email me if you have questions or concerns!  

Homework for tonight is to fix and finish the math review packet, and to complete a page of the spelling and vocabulary packet.

Enjoy the day off everyone!

Another 4 day week! Please help with spelling and vocabulary practice since we will miss one day of classroom practice. This list of words has quite a few twists to it.
Today we worked on the math strategy of making an organized list to answers questions about possible combinations and place-value riddles.  I think its a very challenging strategy to apply but our delightful children said "easy-peasy!". I'm thinking of a Math test on Thursday or Friday depending on how our review lesson goes.
Our story this week is Kumak's Fish, a tall tale from Alaska. If you know any tall tales, please share them with your child!

Our benchmark testing for the beginning of the school year is almost complete (yay!). Just one more math assessment to get a good picture of how everyone is starting the year and we'll be done.  This is all part of the changes in teacher evaluation and the move to Common Core (national) standards.

 I hope everyone will be able to attend Back to School Night on Thursday!

Another busy week!  We worked on fables this week and our big question was "What do we learn by trading with each other?"   Next week we will have our first math test.  We will review in class and I'll send homework for extra review and practice.  Have a great weekend!

We had a good time shopping at the book fair!  If anyone needs to go back to make their purchases, we wil have a little time today.  Since this is a four day week, we have less time to practice for the spelling and vocabulary test so please make sure everyone does their best work with the homework pages for the week.

In ELA this week we are reading a fable and focusing on using sequence to summarize the story. The essential question for the week is "What do we learn by trading with each other". Spelling targets plural spellings, especially changing y to i and add -es. In Math we are working with place value charts, greater and less than symbols

Our Social Studies concepts connect to the fable What About Me?  We will read and discuss barter economies vs. money economies and look briefly into how world cultures benefit from trade.

L'shanah tovah y'all!

Tomorrow we'll have our first chorus lesson!  I know the kids are curious and even a little nervous. I hope they love singing together.  It's one of the things we all remember as adults, isn't it?

What a busy day! We worked through our first day in the new ELA series and boy, is it packed with reading, writing, spelling, vocabulary, and writing lessons!  I hope everyone received their spelling/vocab packet.  We took the pretest today and you can see how your child did on that on the first page of the packet.  Tonight's homework is to complete one more page of the packet very neatly.

Today's math was reading and writing 3 and 4 digit numbers using words, numbers, and place value blocks. The math page  that went home today is an example of what we will often have for homework.  It directly reflects the day's math lesson.

So far I'm still unable to access our classroom blog at school so my updates may not happen until later in the evening.

We had a great first day!  We interviewed new friends, worked through a whole packet of first day work, began our class book Classroom At the End of the Hall, and started our back to school bulletin board project.  Best news of the day? EVERYONE got a wise bracelet and some people earned 2 of them!
We are going to start next week on all four burners. Jumping right in to ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies!