Week in Review

Phew! This week was jam packed with lots of things to do! Thanks to all the parents who came out for Open House. It was great to see so many of you again! For those of you that didn't make it, I sent home a conference sign-up sheet with your child. Let me know if you didn't get one. Conferences will be held on October 24 and November 1 from 3:15-7:00pm. Soon, I'll be sending home a pre-conference sheet with your child. This sheet will help us make some goals for your child at our conference.

In Reading we began our Junior Great Books with "Thank you, M'am" by Langston Hughes. So far, students have come up with some great questions and connections to the story! We will study the story even further next week and see if we can answer some of the questions we have.

We also read several picture books this week. We read "The Greedy Triangle" by Marilyn Burns in Math. The triangle changes into lots of different shapes before realizing it wants to be a triangle again. In writing, we read "If" by Sarah Perry. We used her words and pictures to inspire our own class "If" book. I'll be posting pictures from our class book this weekend.

We are almost all the way through our first math unit! This week we learned how to draw circles with compasses. The class worked so hard on this! It's a hard skill to learn. We also learned what a radius is. There is a lot of new vocabulary words within this unit; we'll be posting them on our math word wall next week! We will also have our first math assessment next week. There is no need to study for this assessment at home. We will review the unit in class the day before the assessment. The review will come home if you'd like to review it with your child.

Thursday and Friday we finally started our insect unit! We talked about what we knew about insects and what we hope to learn from our unit. Today we talked about reading to learn vs. learning to read. We practiced highlighting the important information in a paragraph, the first steps to learning how to take notes. We also learned about the head, thorax and abdomen of insects.

We will start NWEA testing on Monday afternoon. Due to some (more) technical issues, we were unable to start this week. I will be able to share the results of the first assessment window with you at conferences.

Have a great weekend!