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!