How on earth can this year be flying by so quickly??? I think November goes fast anyways so I need to buckle my seatbelt as we rapidly approach the end of the year! :)
This week was exciting since we had Halloween on Monday, sugar crash on Tuesday, Entrepreneurship Day on Thursday and a surprise visitor/in school field trip on Friday. This week will be shorter since Tuesday is election day. Only nine more wake ups until Thanksgiving break. We can do this!
I would love to update the blog on Where in the world is Uncle Ricky since he has been gone since Labor Day. I will try and get that done soon.
Also, grades will be in on Tuesday since that is a workday for teachers and I can try and get caught up. My apologies for the delay. I will also send home the glows and grows from last week. I had run out of both colored copy paper and white copy paper.
A couple of house keeping notes. We have had items go missing from the classroom. Specifically I am looking for:
A Lego shark, Lego man, and Lego dog. These do not belong to me, they belong to the competition robotics team that I run out of our classroom.
I am missing a ton of books. I LOVE to lend books out to the students but I always have my name in them just in case. I lost quite a few last year so I implemented a check out system this year. Please send in any books you might find around the house that are labeled Homer on the front cover, the inside cover and/or the pages. I would like to have them available for all students.
Snacks:
I am going through a bunch of snacks. I don't mind feeding kids if they forgot their snack or cannot bring one. If you would like to send some in, I would appreciate it. Snacks are getting costly at the rate we are using them even though it's just crackers. PLEASE let me know if you pack a snack for your student and if they should be getting one. Again, every once and a while is fine-but everyday is excessive.
General Info:
Journals were collected for all classes and will be graded on Tuesday since my weekend disappeared before my eyes.
4th Grade has Wellstar visiting this week as well as hearing & vision screening. If your child wears glasses PLEASE make sure they bring them to school.
NO SCHOOL TUESDAY for students.
Hat Day is Friday.
Ok, icky stuff done. On to the fun stuffs!
ELA: Snake papers are mostly finished! The students graded themselves based on the rubric we created. I have included an activity for the grading on my end so I will have an update for you on how that went next week. Until then I included some pictures of our snakes. We have a group photo of the snakes, a group photo of the kiddos and a silly picture they asked me to take.
Our beautiful snake friends!
Aren't they adorable? The kids are as well! ;)
Sssssssilly Ssssssnake Ssssssnapshot
(because alliteration is Sssssuper!)
ELA PREVIEW: We will present our papers on Monday. The rest of the week will focus on our creative writing prompt with our snake friends. We will also introduce figurative language, similes and metaphors.
READING: We finished our unit on inferencing. We had a fun mystery activity. Please ask your child who Kilroy the mouse is. :)
READING PREVIEW: We will be exploring main idea and introducing sequencing and summarization. If you are asking guided questions at home about books your child is reading, please ask them to tell you what the main idea is. Also ask for "what's going on in the story" because that will lead to summarization which helps us with sequence and vice versa. We will also be back on the farm with Charlotte and Wilbur.
MATH: We had a very productive week in math. We started by using the results from our Fast Fact Friday Formative assessment from the 28th to form groups for the week. We were working on multiplication fact fluency fun. We chunked out each day by starting with Zero on Monday. We worked on over, and Over and O.V.E.R again that
Multiplication = Repeated addition
which = Skip Counting.
This will really help with multiplication AND division fact fluency. As I said we started with Zero because ZERO is EASY! I very rarely allow the word "easy" in the classroom. Hopefully they will hear my voice in their head that ZERO is EASY! Please ask them what is special about ZERO multiplication facts. : ) We watched Schoolhouse Rock on Zero.
Tuesday was reserved for 1's and 5's. Ones are funny and fives are fun. "One's are funny" because most students see the one in the multiplier and put it down as the product like they do with zero. We discussed why this is "funny" as in funny weird, not funny haha. "Fives are fun" because The Schoolhouse Rock song has the kids playing hide n' go seek to skip count by fives.
We moved on to 2's and 4's on Wednesday since they go together. We skip counted by 2's by and then whisper skip counted by 2's for the fours. So it went 2,4,6,8 for the 2's and two, FOUR, six, EIGHT, ten, TWELVE for the 4's. Ask your child to demonstrate because it looks funny written down. :) We watched Schoolhouse Rock on those as well as the next day for 3's and 6's.
Thursday we skip counted by 3's and whisper skip counted for 6's. Example-three, six, nine, twelve and for 6's-three, SIX, nine, TWELVE. All week we also utilized picture supports and worked on writing the equation to match the problem. During independent work time or paired with Poe-get it? Paired with Poe---Parapro? Never mind-I'm sleepy. :) hahaha I was calling students over to conference on what they have been doing for glows and grows in math. Those are going very well.
Friday was a special surprise. My daughter Pinkie is at Palmer and they had paired with a 3rd grade class at Pitner for a STEM activity. They came on Friday so we went to play their magnet based learning games-most of them were math oriented. That was really fun. I was able to get a few pictures of the kids in action. :) We were supposed to do a Friday Fast Fact Fluency Formative but we will do that on Monday instead. Maybe Monday Multiplication Madness?
Fun Friday
MATH PREVIEW: We will continue to work on fact fluency. We will focus on 7's, 8's and 9's and have another Friday fast fact fluency to see where they are. The one this Friday will be 100 problems in 10 minutes to go with the formative base line we did at the beginning of the year. Please keep working on those facts with your child! :)
SS RECAP and PREVIEW: Work was centered around post Civil War reconstruction and introduction to the Gilded Age. We will continue where we left off on our weekly reader and utilize the text and videos/ PowerPoint's for instruction this week.
I am looking forward to a great week and I am THANKFUL that you share your children with me every day!!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions, comments or concerns.
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