Week of October 22nd

Important Dates to Remember:

• Friday, October 19th: Half Day 
• Wednesday, October 31st: Halloween Party 2:15-3:25
• Thursday, November 1st: Reading Logs are due
• Tuesday, November 6th: No School - Voting Day 
• Wednesday, November 21, - 23rd: No School - Thanksgiving Break
• Friday, November 30th: Half Day - Records Day

Halloween Party: Halloween is fast approaching and we have a committee of parents who have been busy preparing fun activities to do during our party.  The party will take place at 2:15-3:25 on October 31st.  Look for a Sign-Up Genius to come home soon.  Your child may bring their costume to school that day and we'll be putting them on in the afternoon.  Please join us if you're available to come during that time!  We would love to see you!  I believe we still need a few parents to run activities, so if you're interested, please email me.

Language Arts: The kids are doing a great job keeping track of their reading minutes on their Reading Calendar!  I will be collecting these at the beginning of every month.  The goal is to read 30 minutes most nights or 600 minutes a month.  We have many very focused readers here and I'm proud of their hard work in this area! In Reading, we have been working hard to make inferences while we read.  We will be starting reading rotations next week so I'll have more time to dig deeper with small groups of students. This week, we spent time reading short paragraphs, pulling out inferences and supporting our claim with evidence from the reading.

Our spelling tests have been looking really good but I've been noticing the kiddos are not integrating those words into their daily writing.  I've been using some of our writing time to teach sentence structure lessons.  I have been also doing some reteaching and the kids have been going back to fix up some of their work.  I think this will be really helpful as we move through our writing units this year. We're continuing with our Realistic Stories unit.  This week, we worked hard to "hook" or reader with grabbers and we talked about the components of a strong introduction. Next week, we'll start digging a little deeper as we work on organization.  We'll be thinking of the end in mind as we learn the beginning, middle, and end strategy.  Adding details, revising, and editing will also be implemented along the way.

Math: We have started practicing our multiplication facts more regularly and will be taking timed tests once a week.  This week, we took a baseline assessment of all the facts.  I like to give this test early in the year so we can chart our progress and set goals.  As the year progresses, we'll notice these scores improving as we begin to master our facts. This week in Friday folders, you will find your child's baseline assessment and their 2's timed test.  If they received a score of 90% or more, then they should begin studying their 3's.  We'll test every Wednesday.
We have finished up our Place Value unit.  I will be sending home corrected tests next Friday.  We're currently working through our Multiplication and Geometry unit.  Some of the big skills we're focusing on are factors, multiples, and prime and composite numbers.  Quick recall of our multiplication facts are really important in this unit and will make learning these concepts a lot easier.

Social Studies:  We're working through our Government unit in Social Studies.  We started by looking at the Constitution and analyzing the Preamble.  We've been discussing the many rights and freedoms we have because of the constitution. Next week, we'll focus on Democracy and begin looking at the many services our Government provides for us.

Science: The first investigation is all about magnetism.  So far, the students have discovered that magnets stick to objects made from iron or steel.  After they explored how magnets interact with each other, they experimented with induced magnetism and temporary magnets.