Week of October 31st

Announcements
Last week, I experienced a new first: A Hurricane Day! Hopefully this isn't a sign of what's in store for the winter!

Conferences will begin on November 7th. The twenty minutes will go by quickly, so if there is anything specific you want to discuss, please feel free to email me in advance.

No School - Veteran's Day (November 12th)

I want to thank Mrs. Cox and Mrs. McCusker for organizing our Halloween Party! Here are a few photos from the party.
     

Writing: 

• The goal for the week was to publish their story. To do this, they copied their stories over, drew illustrations and decided how to put it together.
• Stories will be handed out to parents at conferences so we can go over the grading together.
• Parents are encouraged to read the stories with their child and celebrate the writing skills they are including. With this being their first, true published piece, all students will have goals to continue working on.

Reading: 

• The focus is to continue developing theories about characters. These lessons will help students develop their inferring skills. Lessons from this week:
• Good readers read characters the same way we read people in real life. 
• Readers pay attention to when the character acts out of character and their reasons for doing so.
• Readers pay attention to the objects that the character holds close.

Math

• We spent time solving complicated multiplication problems by breaking them into easier, friendlier numbers. 
• Students spent time using the array model to break apart bigger numbers and used this model solve multiplication problems. 
• Students learned how to play a game called Big Array, Small Array to practice breaking numbers apart. In addition, it helped them practice writing equations to show how the two smaller numbers equal the big number. 

                 

                 

Science/Social Studies

• Students took the science test this Wednesday. Hopefully, I will pass them back by next week. 
• Students are starting a new social studies mini-unit about geography and mapping. They have been doing some reading in our Junior Geographer Atlas books.
• They spent some time discussing the difference between globes and maps and how to decode maps.