January 9: Happy New Year!

We have had a snow cold return from a restful holiday and it was great to see so many of you at Family Friday. We really appreciate the effort you made to come out in this frigid weather so you could play math games with us.

Here's what to expect for next week:

• We will have Dance on Monday. We will not see the teaching artist again until February, when our Dance class resumes. 
• We are starting our work on Opinion Writing. Students will learn to make a strong claim and have evidence to back up their claim. This will then provide the basis for a simple essay. We will learn different ways we can support our claim and how we can develop supporting ideas for each claim. This spirited unit give children an opportunity to express opinions and convince others to agree with their thinking. 
• We are also starting an exciting study of China with a geography project. Your child has a letter with directions for making salt dough as we create a map of this country.  Some students have volunteered their families to make a double batch of dough so that we can have enough to make individual maps. The class enjoyed our earlier project with the salt dough continents and there is a great deal of excitement for this new project. By studying the geography of  this place, we hope to learn how a culture meets the needs of its people using the natural resources of its land. Please have the salt dough in by Wednesday. 
• We will be wrapping up our math work with division facts by the end of this week. While most of our class is very secure with most of their facts, some facts can be tricky. These include the four facts and the eight facts. Please help your child review them with a quick drill if possible. It would be helpful and reassuring. 

Have a wonderful cozy weekend!