FYI

Wanted to update you on a few things. Tomorrow will make up our SE location test and next Tuesday will be the SE capital test. We will also go ahead and test on our spelling words tomorrow as well. If your child missed school on Monday, he/she does not need to take the test. I will double his/her next week's test score. Hopefully, the spelling and geography bees will be held tomorrow. Remember too that tomorrow is our Chinese New Year Celebration. Thanks to those that volunteered. If you could come to the classroom around 1:15 to get our trays and then go to the cafeteria to help fill the trays, that would be great! There will be kindergarten moms helping too! 2 kindergarten moms will be picking up the food as well.

FYI

Hopefully we will have school tomorrow! I forgot to send home the homework assignment yesterday, so we will just plan on homework next week and forget about this week. I will also do spelling enrichment again starting next week. We have been busy with spelling and geography bees in class, so we have been a little more pressed for time. Our spelling bee class champions are Ryan Leap 1st place and Sydney Starks 2nd place! Awesome Ryan and Sydney! I am proud of them and also proud of all who tried out! Our geography bee class champions are Caleb Miles 1st place and Cooper Blodgett 2nd place! Super job Caleb and Cooper! I had several try out for this bee as well and I am very proud of them all! Tomorrow will be the school championship where my kids will compete against other classes to determine the school champions. Good luck RYAN, SYDNEY, CALEB, AND COOPER!

SE Region Game Day!

Our game day was great! The kids did super on their games! They were well thought out and I could tell they knew their stuff! I gave a pop quiz yesterday over all that we have learned about the history of the Southeast and they passed with flying colors!!!! Take a look at the games and the day!

Week of 1/26

Wow! The social studies games were awesome! I am so proud of the kids! I will post pictures sometime soon. This week we will be busy as usual!

Math: Long division, continued review of previous skills learned

Reading: Continued study of tall tales, Pink and Say and related vocabulary/comprehension work (Pink and Say is a wonderful and true story about 2 boys of different races on opposite sides of the Civil War and how they came together and helped each other.)

Science: We will begin our space unit this week!

Social Studies: Last Friday, the children got a chance to play each other's games. We then talked about all the events, people, and places of the SE's history and put everything together on a timeline. This week, I will give the kids a pop quiz on this info. We will also test over the SE state locations on Wednesday and the capitals on Thursday. I sent home a study guide last Thursday. Hopefully your child made it home with it. If not, he or she needs to bring a social studies book home.

English: figurative language, friendly letters

Spelling: /er/sounds

early
earth
search
service
wonder
surface
curly
shirt
thirty
doctor
sailor
shower
bakery
another
barber
collar
worse
world

special words: pilfer and idiom

Picture Day is Thursday.

Please remember that Friday is our Chinese New Year celebration with our kindergarten buddies. Don't forget to send $2 by Thursday to help cover the cost of the feast. Also, if you can help out that afternoon, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

DUE DATES ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR!

SOCIAL STUDIES GAMES ARE DUE ON FRIDAY. WE HAVE TALKED A LOT ABOUT THEM IN CLASS, SO HOPEFULLY EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT IS EXPECTED. I HAVE HEARD A LOT OF GREAT IDEAS SO FAR AND HAVE SEEN SOME COOL GAMES ALREADY! CAN'T WAIT FOR FRIDAY!

Week of 1/20

Wow! This month is flying by! Here is what's on the agenda:

Reading: We didn't finish our biography posters yet, so that will be our first priority. The kids are doing a super job on them! We will also get to start our tall tale unit this week. We were just too busy last week to get to it.

Math: We will start division beginning with division facts and moving to 2 digit dividends with 1 digit divisors with remainders. I tested the children last week on 2 and 3 digit multiplication and problem solving and the majority of the class did super making A's, B's, and C's. They have been working hard! The few children that didn't pass are the ones that do not know their multiplication facts. Parents please make sure your children know their facts. Please keep working on them daily. Don't give up! They will learn them through repetition. I know it's tough.......hang in there!
Every morning, we either do a math review page out of the text or contest math. Contest math is when I write review math problems on the smart board and the children are divided into 2 teams. They do the problems on paper, write their name and team letter on it and turn it in. Every problem they get correct, is a point earned for their team. We have done 3 contest math days and the 2 teams were within 1 point of each other until the last contest day and Team A pulled 13 points ahead. Wow! Anything can happen!

English: We will have fun with idioms this week!

Social Studies: Tuesday will be the last day for working on SE region projects. Wednesday and Thursday, we will watch videos and do related work on Harriet Tubman and Abraham Lincoln. On Friday, the games are due and we will have our game day. Look at the previous post to make sure you know what is expected for the game. It might not hurt for the kids to start studying the SE state's locations and capitals. Those 2 tests will be next week. I will send home another study guide this week.

Spelling: er/est words

cleaner and cleanest
bigger and biggest
earlier and earliest
quicker and quickest
busier and busiest
rougher and roughest
heavier and heaviest
happier and happiest
lazier and laziest

special words: inauguration and president

We had very close to 100% of the class bring in their reading/math homework on Friday! Woohoo! I am so proud of them. I also want to thank you parents for making it a priority. I did realize that 2 of the math problems were things we have not covered. I am so sorry about that. My intention is for the math to be a review only. This week and here after, that will be the case! Thanks though for helping them through those tough problems.

Have a great week and I will post more if new news happens!

Social Studies Game due next Friday

The children have been studying an important person or event in the Southeast region of the United States. Last week and this week, they have been working on the completion of 2 projects related to their topic. The next project due is a game. The game has to be about their topic with the objective being to teach their classmates about their area of expertise! They need to design a gameboard with pieces making sure that it is teaching their person or event. They might want to make question and answer cards to go with their game or write the questions right on the game board. The sky is the limit as long as they include: a gameboard, playing pieces, directions, and it teaches their topic. Some of the children have finished their partner projects already, so I have allowed them to start on their game in class. The game, however, is technically a homework assignment. I have told the children, they can discuss in class their game idea and decide what each partner will be responsible for, or they can get together outside of school to work on the game. If partners are having a hard time with making either of those options work, then they may choose to do an individual game. The game is worth 200 points in social studies, so you might want to ask your child what their "game" plan is. You absolutely can help with ideas and supplies, but please don't do it for them. The children seem very excited about designing a game. I have already heard some terrific ideas. Next Friday will be our Game Day! The children will rotate in groups playing each other's games. Hopefully, they will walk away having learned something new!

Spelling Lists

lived

living

rattled

rattling

studied

studying

traveled

traveling

changed

changing

appeared

appearing

raced

racing

hoped

hoping

wrapped

wrapping

trivial - unimportant

sequence - puting things in order



Enriched spelling

accentuate

banquet

carousel

delicious

eligible

featured

gardener

harassed

interfere

jeopardy

lasagna

malnutrition

necessary

omelet

paraphrase

Week of 1/12

Hi Families! Hope you are back in the groove of school again! Here is what's ahead:

Math: double digit multiplication, daily review of previous concepts learned

Reading: skill - sequence and flashbacks, biography poster completion, begin a tall tales unit

Spelling: I left my list at school. I will post it tomorrow.

English: pronouns, prepositions

Social Studies: SE region partner projects

Science: We will begin a science unit in February after the completion of our SE region unit. I am still debating which unit I want to do. We have covered Earth science and I will do Life science in the Spring, but I can't figure out which Physical science unit I want to do. So many fun things to teach and so little time!

Homework: Don't forget to talk to your child about their reading/math weekly homework assignment. I will hand it out tomorrow and it is due on Friday. Remember that they can bring a juice on Friday with their homework. We will review the work while drinking juice that morning.

Book orders are due on Friday.

If you have any, don't forget to save us Kleenex boxes.

On January 30th, we will do a mini China unit and have a Chinese New Year celebration with our Kindergarten buddies. We will be having a Chinese meal at 1:00 that afternoon. The meal includes fried rice, an egg roll, and a fortune cookie along with chopsticks! Miss Jenkins and I need $2 to help cover the cost of the meal. Please send the $2 to school by Jan. 28th. If anyone can help with picking up the food at Imperial China and/or help with set up/clean up, please let me know. We will greatly appreciate it!

Homework

I forgot to mention in the previous post about homework for this semester. This second half of the year, I want to do a more skill focused approach to homework. Each Monday, I will send home a story for the kids to read with questions at the end of it. It will also have a few math review questions. The homework will be due on Friday. Your child may bring a juice to school that morning to drink while we are going over the homework. This homework is worth 50 points in reading and 50 points in math. This week they will have 3 days instead of 4 days to get the homework completed, but I know they can do it! Please look for this homework and make sure your child completes it and gets it in his/her backpack.

Book orders for January will go out this week. Remember that you can make one check out to Scholastic for different orders.

We had a super day today! The kids worked hard!

Week of 1/06

Hi Families!

Hope your holidays were wonderful! I wanted to start this post with a heartfelt thank you for your generous Christmas gifts and very sweet words in your cards. I feel very overwhelmed with gratitude for your generosity and kindness, but mostly thankful for the fact that you are entrusting your precious children to me this school year. They are the biggest gift, I am sure you would agree!

Tuesday we will start the day running! We have learned a lot this past 1st half of the year, from Oklahoma history and the Northeast region of the USA, to geology, rounding and multiplying big numbers! We have spent a lot of time reading and working on not only our fluency levels, but comprehension levels as well. We, however, have a lot more to learn! This week in math, we will spend one day reviewing multiplying big numbers by 1 digit, and then the rest of the week learning how to multiply 2 digit numbers by 2 digit numbers. In reading, we will focus on context clues and every child will read a biography and do a biography poster. The biography posters are very cool! On Friday, I received 8 new fun reading games from a grant I won! Baylee, Brian, and I have been trying them out this weekend. They are lots of fun! The games focus on different reading skills, such as context clues, main idea, inference, etc. In social studies, we will begin the Southeast region. We will start off with learning what states make up the Southeast and then on Wednesday, I will partner up kids to become experts on an important person, event, or feature of the Southeast. They will do the research, 2 projects on their topic, present to the class, and then create a game to reinforce the topic for our game day held at the end of the unit. My students in the past have always enjoyed this unit and they tend to remember things more learning this way, then when they just read things out of a textbook! In English, our focus will be pronouns. In spelling, we will study compound words. Here is the list:

anyone
however
everything
himself
birthday
herself
somewhere
afternoon
chalkboard
daydream
downstairs
grandparents
breakfast
outfield
scarecrow
nobody
dragonfly
keyboard

special words are: adversary & context clues

Could you please save empty kleenex boxes for me? I only need the kind like Kleenex brand that open on top (rectangle shape), not like the Puffs brand that open on side and top. I know some of the generic brands open on top too. Any like that would be fine if you get any! Thanks so much!