Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday and Happy Halloween!!!   It gets a little crazy on these days because kids are so pumped up for the afternoon activities.  I am trying to force some actual learning in this morning.  Our parade is always the favorite of the day along with scary stories, haunted houses, and eating cookies.  Please be safe tonight on your trick or treating adventures.  I would like to point out that I will not be home for the kids to come to my house.  I will be in Lewis Central watching the girls volleyball team on their second round in the regional tournament.  If they would win tonight it will be the first time since 1987 that Creston Volleyball has made it to substate, which was when the team made it all the way to state.  I am proud to say I was member of that team!!  Go Panthers!!!

Language Arts- We read a story last week called "Invasion of Mars" it was a story based on the Orson Welle's War of the Worlds.  It was a radio broadcast of that event meant to entertain people.  The problem with it was if people didn't hear the introduction, they thought the broadcast was live and true.  They assumed we were really being attacked by aliens.  It was total chaos.  Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of this broadcast.  I found it on internet and we listened to it.  We decided it did sound real and would be very scary.  This week we are reading about a young girl who is writing an apology to the librarian for something she did.  It is a funny story about how we do things cause we are told to but never fully take responsibility for our own behavior.  We have laughed about it but also talked about how we each do this in some way.  We have worked on compound and complex sentences this week, which has not been an easy task.  Also in decoding we practiced recognizing common beginning syllables like: a, be, de, con, com, and pre.  The students worked in partners to divided words into syllables.   Remember to study vocabulary tonight, we will take the end of the week assessment tomorrow.

Math - Today we took a test over Chapter 3.  I am excited to see how the students did. This is the first assessment I have given the kids in this subject where I have taught all the material.  I hope to see some great scores!!  I feel they did a great job learning the skills taught this chapter.  We focused on multiplication and division and also had a little bit of algebra in there working with variables.  Next we will move into a chapter on Geometry.  We will probably spend the rest of this year discussing Geometry.  Towards December we may work on charts, graphs and data.  

Social Studies- We picked our states this week!  They also chose the project they will do.  I will send home due dates next week. They are all very excited about doing this.  We have begun talking about the Northeast Region.  It is made up of 11 states:  Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.  We have talked about Niagara Falls and the power plants there.  We have talked about the Appalachian Mountains, and a few other significant mountain ranges.  We have also discussed that two states out of the 11 do not have a border with the Atlantic Ocean and that the region has both rocky shores and sandy beaches on their coastline.

Happy Halloween!!  Have a great night trick or treating, but remember the Language arts end of the week test!!!

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels