Week 12

This week we started doing our nonfiction reading and writing. We just saw our 1st grade buddies and read our letters to them. On Thursday we were taught how to use variables in math. We are learning about culture for social studies. And we love school!                               
by Jane and Jasey

We received our school pictures today and your child has it in the homework folder (it's in the long white envelope). Directions for ordering were delivered after school and will go home on Monday. Please keep an eye out for that.

This week's reading response will look different because we've switched to studying nonfiction. Each child has to create a main idea web from the nonfiction reading book they have chosen to read by themselves. Many nonfiction books can be brief. At home, when your child is done reading his or her nonfiction book, it is recommended that they return to reading a fiction book to keep up their reading stamina.

Here's what will happen next week:

• We are visiting the Armory on Tuesday. Please make sure your child is dressed with sneakers. 
• We will visit with our buddies again on Wednesday. 
• Schools will be closed on Thursday and Friday due to Thanksgiving. Due to the shorten week, there will not be a reading response and writing entry due on November 30th. 

Please check out our new video presentations for Antartica and Asia on our video link. They will be up by Saturday. Have an excellent weekend!

Week 11

From now on, we will start with a post from our class blog reporters:

This week our class learned how to use a multiplication table. We are also finishing our writing pieces. We just finished making our salt dough maps on our landforms. We will have family Friday and we will be decorating shopping bags.

                                   By: Jasey and Jane

We've had a lot of activities this Friday. Family Friday was a wonderful time for us to share our talents with the community as our students decorated food delivery bags for God's Love We Deliver.

We are also wrapping up our work with continents in the next week. As some of you have seen, our salt dough maps are complete and students have worked in groups to collect facts on famous landforms on each continent. They have also been working on presenting information and we have some presentations filmed. Please check out our video playlist after Saturday for some presentations. There will be seven films in total posted by the end of this upcoming week.

Here's what's coming up:

• On Monday, we start our work with Nonfiction texts. The focus of this reading unit is to learn how to find the main ideas of texts and determine the importance of what we are reading. We want our children to read books to learn.
• We will also start a new writing unit. Students will write Information Books, where your child will be asked to teach others about a topic that they know a lot about. You will also notice that the Writer's Notebook will contain a new menu for the Wednesday night writing homework. This is to encourage your child to look for writing ideas that will help with our nonfiction writing. 
• In Social Studies, we will begin to exam the concept of Culture. For our purposes, culture will be defined as the rules and habits of a group of people. Culture can include foods, games, art , shelter, history, and geography. Your child will receive an Ancestor Research Sheet and we ask you to help your child to fill it in so that we can learn more about our individual cultures.
• We will have our Chapter 4 Math test on Tuesday. Chapter 5 will also allow us more time to practice and retain the multiplication facts. 
• We are Buddy classes with Ms. Ancona's 1st grade class. We briefly said hello to each other at our Friday assembly and we'll meet up on Wednesday afternoons from now on. 

Have a wonderful weekend!

Week 10

Parent Teacher conferences flew by! I appreciated your patience and understanding as we caught up and shared information about the children. In class, the children and I spoke about making goals for the second marking period and keeping up our good progress.

I also want to thank the families who bought books for our classroom library from the book fair and from our Amazon Wishlist. These books are exciting and we look forward to using them in our upcoming Nonfiction and Africa units!

Here's what's happening next week:

• Schools will be closed on Wednesday for Veterans Day. 
• Family Friday will center around a project for God's Love We Deliver. We will decorate food deliver bags for the upcoming holiday seasons.

Have a beautiful weekend!