Have no fear...the blog entry is here!

     Last week was amazing! Our class worked incredibly hard and we accomplished so much. It was so nice to be in school for five full days. This week we will also work hard, but we are faced with an unusual week. Tuesday is a half day for the students (12:10 dismissal). I am a member of the district's Science team and I will be out all day on Wednesday for our first meeting of the year. Thursday is our Book Fair preview day. We will browse the Book Fair at 9:55. On Friday, we will have an opportunity to purchase books from 11:30-12:00. Please feel free to come in and join us. Just sign in at the office and come right down to the classroom. We have recess and lunch right after and you are more than welcome to stay. Also, on Friday afternoon I have a district meeting to attend on our writing curriculum. I will be out of the room from 12:00 until the end of the day.


Reading
     We put the finishing touches on our character study last week. We also began reading short texts (fiction and nonfiction) together and closely studying the author's purpose, word choice and main idea.
     This week we will begin our nonfiction unit. We will begin by examining the common text features found in nonfiction and how we can use them to help deepen our understanding of a nonfiction text or article. We will continue to read short stories and poems together this week.

Writing
     We are close to finishing our paragraph unit and our personal narrative unit. This week we will work on revising our narratives and adding more detail to the heart of the story. We will also continue to practice writing cohesive paragraphs.

Math
    It is here!!!! MULTIPLICATION!!! The class is very excited and so am I. We will be taking a short test on subtraction and then begin our first multiplication unit. We begin by relating addition to multiplication, then looking at arrays and the properties of multiplication.

Science
    We pollinated our plants and we have been watching our seed pods grow. This week we will finish our unit and make our final observations.

Language Arts
     We have been reviewing what makes a complete sentence and the different types of sentences. We are preparing to learn about compound and complex sentences. We will also learn how to properly use quotation marks so that we can begin writing dialog.

   We had a very nice Halloween party and we did so many fun activities on Friday we weren't able to write a Friday Letter.

Last week we used Base 10 blocks to model subtraction with regrouping.

We pollinated our plants using real bees!

Look at all that pollen!

Thank you to our Mystery Reader Dr. Metallo (Ryleigh's grandfather).

We also had a student Mystery Reader last week, Sara.

Happy Halloween from my ninja and police officer!