Happy Thursday!

so much to share...so little time...

First of all...a HUGE thank you to AJ's mom and meemaw...they worked on something for our class while meemaw was visiting...and now we have classroom cushions!! These cushions are one of the things the kids can use their tickets for...and boy, have they been earning tickets! I have a cute picture of two of our friends on the cushions from yesterday that I will post later!

Secondly...Scholastic book orders are due Monday. Every month I will send home a Scholastic book order. Jessie's mom has offered to organize and mail the orders for us...thank you, Mrs. Kilgore! Ordering books is totally optional...whenever you choose to order books, our classroom gets points that I can apply to free books for the classroom...so as we get closer to holidays, think about placing an order! If you have any questions, throw me an email.

Now...onto the academics!

Did you know that your children are creating travel brochures? Applying the knowledge gained from Unit 1 in Social Studies (climate, physical geography, natural resources, mapping, directions), the kids have been diligently working on a final product...a travel brochure! The goal of this brochure is to entice people to visit and inform possible tourists about one of the 50 states in our country! I can't wait for you to see them!

The research needed to make the brochure integrated Language Arts indicators, too! The students needed to skim complex text to find the main ideas of passages...we used non-fiction literature and an online database to search for information.

The kids have continued working on during reading strategies while reading their novel...we have focused mainly on making inferences. The kids are improving as we move through each chapter...

In writing, the kids are working on creative pieces and taking their piece through the writing process. We have students at all different stages of writing right now...and we should have some published pieces in the near future. Writer's Workshop is twice a week, but it's certainly not the only time the kids are writing. Directed writing assignments take place in all aspects of the curriculum. Writer's Workshop is the place where the writing process and the six traits of writing are directly instructed.

Phew...teaching math is both exhilarating and exhausting!! We have kids at many different levels, so I am constantly using flexible groups in the classroom. We moved from numeration and understanding place value with big numbers to adding, subtracting, and estimating with larger numbers. Every lesson has a math warm up...a challenging problem to get the kids focused and engaged in math...we then have some sort of concept mini lesson, followed by group work and independent follow-up. We also focus on writing in math. It is important to reinforce that your children need to be using many details in their math writing to help describe how they solve problems, show multiple strategies, and use whatever tools necessary. REMINDER...if your child brings home an assignment that is too hard...that is MY mistake...please encourage your child (maybe show them this blog) to turn in the paper with a note from you...this helps me know where gaps are that I'm unaware of. I realize in a perfect world, I would recognize all the gaps...but that is not always the case. I provide a perfect world 4/5 days a week...HA! Just kidding.

I hope you and your family have a wonderful weekend. Reminder...next week is a little nutty...we have off on Thursday and then a 2 hour early dismissal on Friday.