They are starting to get it -

Sorry to be so slow in posting this week, "Life Happens!"

The first few weeks of school are partly for teaching routines: what we do, how we do it and when we do it. Some of the students are starting to get the routines. Yea! This is a good beginning. Some students are still struggling but if they keep trying they will not only get the routines but become great students.

Tuesday Sept. 8th, we made it through the whole day without having to move any students to lonely street (off by themselves) because of too much talking. I hope this is a trend.

Vocabulary

We are working on words from a book called, " Just Plain Fancy" by Patricia Palocco. It is about a peacock egg that got mixed up with the chicken eggs. The words we will focus on for vocabulary are:
peer
shun
exotic
gossiping
constantly
simplicity

The students mostly did very well on the last test.
We will take our time on this book and the test on these words will be next Friday, September 18th.

Spelling

This week we are continuing our study of Consonant Blends this time blends that have an "l". In consonant blends you say all the sounds of all the letters, you just blend them together.

Next week's spelling will be learning to spell words with onsets and rhimes - these are also called word families. The ones we will be working on are: -ack, -eck, -ick, -ock, -uck. Some of the words are: black, clock, truck, stick, and deck. We will learn a song called "The -ck, -ck, -ck Rap". It talks about the "Duck stuck in the muck." and "The black backpack hung on the rack."
Some of our challenge words come from our study of rocks.

Writing

We have been studying nouns, verbs and describing words. We learned that a sentence is a group of words that mean something. It has to make sense. The sentence must begin with a capital letter and end with punctuation. We also learned that a sentence must have a noun and a verb (Subject and Predicate). We took a simple sentence and added some details and it became an interesting sentence. (The dog ran.) (The fat little French Bulldog ran quickly through the grass.) The students also drew a treasure map of their house and yard and marked x'es where they had great or treasured memories. They then listed these treasured memories as ideas for their writings. They began a story about one of their treasured memories.

Math

We have started the learning process in the subjects of time, money, geometry, patterns, data and graphing and problem solving. The students have learned about the base ten number system that we use, open figures and polygons, rounding, estimating and measurement. The last two days they have been involved in figuring out if Bag X has _____ blocks are there enough for each student in the class to have one block. They have to answer questions like: Are there any leftovers? If so, how many? Are more blocks needed? If so, how many? They are always asked to show with numbers, pictures or words how they figured out their answers. "Good mathematicians always write about how they figured things out."

Misc.

The 5th grade buddies came and helped the students make giant sunflowers. Look for them in our hallway. We will be doing more sunflower activities. The students also have made a quilt about themselves. It is also in our hallway. And, our bulletin board has great stories the students have written about their summer vacation. The cover to the stories are glyphs about each student. This weeks keyword is: "sunflower."

Thanks to all who filled out the survey about using the blog. Fourteen responses would like an email linking you to the blog. Two wanted only emails with important information and two preferred printed notes. There was no response from only 3 parents. This weekend I will work on setting up the email list and send emails linking you to the blog. I will still send paper notes to those 5 who did not prefer this option. I'm hoping all will soon opt in to this great way to communicate. There will still be some notes from school especially for field trip. Look for one of these on Monday September 14th.

THANKS!

Thank you to all the parents who have signed on to volunteer in the classroom. Thanks also to Angie Brown for setting up the bolunteer schedule and calendar. It is a huge job to meet the needs of all these students and I truely appreciate all the help you give. Thanks also go to those parents who have sent in items for the classroom and for the token store. You are all awesome!