November 30th

You're Invited!

Our class will be memorizing and performing holiday poetry for you on Wednesday, December the 19th from 8:30 to about 9:10. This will be a very informal time just to be together and celebrate the season! If you cannot attend please make sure someone comes to watch your child. It can be a grandparent, aunt, uncle, or a neighbor. Let me know if you cannot find anyone to attend and I should be able to help. The children will be acting out winter poetry and will need to dress up/bring props to “show” their poem. Poems need to be memorized by December 14th.

I can't believe November is over and we are heading into December!   I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and got lots of rest and good family time. Here is what we are diving into this month.  Reading-We are reading Because of Winn Dixie together as a class and continuing to study elements of fiction and using our Nooks to learn how to write summaries as we read each chapter. Writing-We are learning about adjectives and next will be adverbs and how to use them to spice up our writing.. Math-We just finished our big unit on multiplication and division of bigger numbers. I just added a video explaining the strategies we are using for multiplication and division in class, click on this link and scroll down to see our strategies explained  We are starting a unit on measurement that will take us to the holidays. Computation will continue to be practiced daily.  Content-We are finishing up our study of the first settlements of our nation and now we are learning about the 13 colonies. The kids will have notes and study guides in their social studies folders and I will also be posting resources that will help them study on Edmodo. Tech News-The latest news on Overdrive (our check out app for e-books on the Nook) is that SSC has started our own e-books library! We will be able to use Overdrive with SSC e-books very soon! It will have books hand chosen for the kids by our librarian, Mrs. Owens. Look for more information to come home soon. As far as the public library, the kids can still check out books from home under your supervision. Remember that this opens up the ENTIRE public library to your children, so keep close tabs on what they are checking out if you are allowing this from home.

*Check our calendar for other important dates.
  Sites: Since this is also the season for lots of colds and coughing, we watched a video and took a quiz on Health Safety. All of the kids did great! A hard copy will not come home in signed papers but you can see the video and the quiz they took on this link.

Links for extra practice:

• Adjectives
• Adverbs
• Measurement  (under construction, I am adding links)
• Computation
• 13 Colonies

November 8th

We had a GREAT time in Huntsville, I can't thank our chaperones enough! They helped us get through the day safely and made our trip run smoothly! Don't forget to add your photos to our class album! Classroom happenings: Reading-We finished our study of allegory, the author's deeper meaning or "theme" and anthropomorphism, when animals speak in stories and usually teach us a lesson. We are looking closely at features of fiction writing. We have just finished reading City of Ember and many of the kids want to read the second book during their independent reading time. We get to watch the movie tomorrow! Writing-Soon we will re-publish our memory writing that we did at the beginning of the year on kidblog. The kids did a wonderful job drafting, editing, revising and publishing their Veteran's Day pieces. And we have just finished our 1st person narratives on our Explorers and have made Vokis from our writing. The kids had a great time making the Vokis. See our Vokis here!  Math-Multiplication and division with bigger numbers! Right now in multiplication, we are just splitting apart one of the factors to solve the problem. (see example here), our Big Array, Small Array game helped us with that strategy. Very soon we will learn how to split apart both factors without leaving out any of the "parts". For division, most of the kids are using the "multiply up" strategy. Content-We have just started our study of the very first American settlements. Ask your child to tell you about Roanoke, Jamestown and Plymouth. Next we will be studying the 1st 13 colonies and then begin our study of the Causes of the Revolutionary War.  Technology-Check out our Vokis on the link above, don't forget to make comments on your child's kidblog, if you have forgotten the log in,, just let me know. Continue talking about digital citizenship and online safety! *Check our calendar for other important dates.

Links of the month: I added our "Parents in the Know" Daily newspaper link to the top of this blog.
Social Studies Links on Jamestown, 13 Colonies, Causes of the Revolution
Math Links for multiplication and division
Reading: Show your child where to get ideas for what to read next.
Writing: Let your child try this "friendly letter generator"