October 5th

Classroom happenings: Reading-We are finishing up our study of the different genres in reading. To culminate, the kids are making posters of their favorite genres to be displayed in the halls. We just finished a read aloud book called Flying Solo, by Ralph Fletcher, ask the kids what they would do if I did not show up for work one day! Our new read aloud is The City of Ember. by Jeanne DuPrau, an exciting book about when mankind is about to come to an end and a group of scientists decide to build and populate a city deep underground. Continue to make sure your child is "sticking with a book" and reading on his/her just right level. We should now all be logging on Reading Rewards each night. If you have not seen it, ask your child to "show you around" the site. How fun to be able to share our books and reviews with each other and the rest of world.  Writing-We are publishing our favorite piece from our memory writing, the kids have done a wonderful job! We will also put these on our blogs. We will be doing lots of writing on our blogs. We have talked about revising and editing before we click the publish button. This is a great opportunity for you to log on, read some of your child's writing, praise them for the good things, and give helpful suggestions for anything they need to work on. To log on, have your child shoe you how to get to our blogs, choose "guest" from the drop down menu, and use the password "constantine". You are welcome to make positive comments on any of our blogs, just type your name first so we will know who you are!  Math-We have just begun our study of  multiplication. We should be very close to fluent with all tables 1-12 and we are starting to multiply bigger numbers, division with bigger numbers starts soon too. Content-We enjoyed sharing our solar system projects last week and have started  our study of electricity this week. We investigated magnets and we are about to start learning about light bulbs and how to create a circuit of electricity and light our bulb with only a battery, a wire, and a bulb. Don't give any hints! The kids will have a great time investigating! :)

 *Check our calendar for important dates.

  Technology: We have learned to use many new sites already, remember, a list of the sites and our usernames and passwords are behind the important papers tab in our BEE Book. Feel free to make a copy to keep at home.

• Lab Lessons - Here is where we go to get our assignments when we are in the computer lab. The kids do not always get to finish the "extra" assignments, so they are welcome to go here at home.
• Here are video tutorials/scavenger hunts for the websites we have learned to use so far, in case you or your child need a refresher. Please continue to have conversations about online safety.
• We will start using Edmodo more! The kids should be a member of 3 groups, Math, Reading and Writing, and Social Science. Please use the parent join code and make your own Edmodo account. You can see the parent code when your child logs in on the right at the bottom of the screen.
• We finally all have Nooks, yay! We are a pilot class so I would not be surprised if there are more glitches during the year. But I can say that it is definitely helping our kids be problem solvers! I am proud of our class for being leaders in technology. Thank you for all of your help! If you're having difficulties with the Nook that we haven't figured out yet, feel free to go by Barnes and Noble and ask their Nook experts. If you solve a problem, or discover a neat trick, please add it to our Nook tricks and troubleshooting form. The kids can add to this form too. If we get lots of good ideas, we will publish it to help teachers and classrooms next year.