Weekly Update 11/15/13

Hi Families,
**Next week on Thursday is math morning.  You will hear a presentation from 8:30 - 9:00 in the auditorium before heading to our classroom for math activities where your child will be the teacher form 9:00 - 9:9:30.  If you can join us form 8:30 - 9:30 that would be wonderful.  If you can't, no worries, just let me know and I will be sure your child is matched with another student or staff.
**Thanksgiving week: Wednesday is a half day with dismissal at 12:00.  There is no school on that Thursday or Friday.
Can you believe we saw our first sight of winter this week?  I know many of you love the snow!  Me?  Not so much and I'd prefer it stay far away!  It's been a short week but we've been busy.  In literacy, we focused on reader's theater with George and Martha stories.  Reader's theater helps students work on their fluency skills by reading a skit and using emotion and their voice to bring the story across.  We switched with some students in other classes so it was good to see other how each class worked so hard!  We also finished up our James Marshall unit.  Students are writing book recommendations to help a friend choose which James Marshall book they should pick.  Next week, we'll be focusing more on nonfiction text features and their purpose.  In writing, we shared our stories with our buddies on Tuesday to celebrate the end of the narrative unit.  On Thursday, we wrote our piece the same way we did our first one, we did a pre-assessment in September and now we completed the post-assessment.  I have not scored it yet, but just by walking around, I can see the hard work they are doing and how much they've strengthened their writing skills.  I can't wait to read them!  We also finished up Unit 3 in math, focusing on place value and making change.   Our next unit will be focusing on more difficult money problems, story problems for addition and subtraction, and more clock work.  We completed our work on the United States and next week we will be looking at our next science unit of Earth, Moon, and Sun.  Students usually love this unit and I look forward to getting started!
Have a great weekend!