November 26, 2012

Welcome back everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break.

The children enjoyed their terrific Thanksgiving pies!  Thank you to everyone who helped make this special for us!

This week we are back at work with new spelling and vocabulary words.  The new vocabulary words are: act, additional, advice, crumple, fan, memorize, mystify, pause, transparent, vanish

We completed our poetry unit before the break, and will continue working on another personal narrative the next two weeks.  Our Author's Celebration will be Monday, December 17 after Town Meeting.  Please join us this day to see the writing that your children have done!  

This week we will continue our math unit involving multiplication and division.  It is very important that your child memorize math facts into the 12s.  

Our reading workshop will focus on our reading groups and having good discussions about our reading.  We are continuing our study of native Florida tribes and reviewing material about forces and energy in our science book.  

Thank you, Mrs. Bernstein, for organizing our holiday gift drive.  We have a decorated box placed outside our classroom door to place the gifts.  The gift drive ends on December 14.

Wishing you all a wonderful week!

November 12, 2012

Happy Monday Everyone!
Wow! Poetry in the Park was so much fun!  Our class did an excellent job, and I am very proud of them.

This week will be packed with lots of learning!  We are focused on poetry in our reading and writing workshops.  The children learned Haiku poetry, will write an "I Used To" poem, and also a free verse poem. We will have our regular spelling test as well as vocabulary test this Friday.
Tomorrow we will have a math test over our unit on measurement.  A practice test went home with your child today.  We went over all the answers in class.  Our next unit will involve multiplication and division. It will be very helpful for your child to have the facts memorized into the 12's.  Good old fashioned flash cards really do help! Of course, we will also learn about the first Thanksgiving as well as continue our unit on Florida native tribes.

This Friday the students will have pie after lunch as part of our Thanksgiving treat.  Thank you to the parents who have agreed to assist with this.

Soon it will be our gift drive.  Our amazing room mom, Amy Held, sent an email to everyone giving more specific details.  Thank you, Amy!

I always end my blog with something like..."Wishing you a wonderful week!"
This week I will end it with...
Wishing you all a very happy Thanksgiving!  Enjoy your time off next week with family and friends.  And, thank you all for being wonderfully, support parents!

November 5, 2012

Happy Monday Everyone!
We are in for a second week in a row of Crazy-Busy-Week!  This Thursday is Poetry in the Park.  We are very excited about our poem "Eat-It-All-Elaine".  Ashley Oleyar was voted by her classmates to be our "Elaine".  I'm confident she will do a great job.  Please have your child practice the poem at home.  Our class has been blessed with t-shirts to wear for our poem.  I will hand them out the day of the program.  Please have your child wear their uniform bottom, and if the weather is cool you may wish for them to wear a neutral long sleeve shirt to wear under the t-shirt.

Just a reminder that this Friday is a professional development day for teachers so students have no school.  Since the week is cut short, we will not have a spelling test or Friday comprehension sheet this week.

Some other class news...
We began a unit of study with reading and writing poetry.  Please ask your child what they have observed about the poems they read so far.  We are also continuing to read Charlotte's Web.  Both of these units will be completed before the Thanksgiving break.

I noticed that many of the children are having difficulty with measurement conversions.  They will need to know the basics such as:
12 inches = 1 foot
36 inches = 1 yard
100 centimeters = 1 meter   BUT...they will need to apply this to problems such as:
3 yards = _____ inches
6 ft = _____ yards
______ meters = 300 centimeters

We will have a math test next week over our measurement unit.

I wish you all a wonderful week!