November 14: Beginning of the Second Marking Period

My thanks to everyone who made it out to Parent Teacher Conferences for being patient and having informative conversations with me about the children. The time allotted was brief but we will continue to communicate so that we can best help the kids have the best learning experiences possible. There were no Friday updates in the homework folders this week but I will resume writing them next week.

Here's what's coming next week:

• We are starting a new reading unit on Monday. This unit will focus on Nonfiction Reading and the goal is to help our readers to not just accumulate facts, but to think about how these facts build a larger meaning. We will work more intensively on locating a main idea and important supporting details. We will also look at what the purpose of the text is and how the structure of the text (compare and contrast, pros and con, etc.) helps convey the author's message to the reader. Nonfiction reading skills can be applied to content areas like Social Studies and Science, so this is an exciting unit for our kids!
• The Unit 4 math test was given today so we will start Unit 5 on Monday, which takes the basic multiplication facts we have learned and applies them to other problems with larger numbers. 
• After missing some Tuesdays, we will have Music class again. Many children have brought their recorders home but please make sure they are brought back to class for this Tuesday's class. 
• We will meet with our Kindergarten Buddies again this Wednesday. We visited Mrs. David's class this Wednesday to meet our new friends. Our third graders were so helpful and did an excellent job of helping the younger students write about their favorite things!

If you have not returned your child's report card, please do so as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation!

Have a wonderful weekend!