Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!!  Well we are at that time of year where we start talking about the St. Malachy Foundation Auction.  I am slow to get going this year.  I am wondering if anyone is interested in helping to put together a basket for our class.  I have some ideas and don't mind helping but would like a parent of two to join in.  Let me know if you are willing or able.  I always do a scrapbook for out silent auction.  That won't change I plan on doing that again.  I work with Maple Street Memories on that but will love to have parent helpers the day we are making the pages.  I will plan on doing that on Wednesday, February 19th, at 2:00.  Let me know if you can help out for either things.

Language Arts - We haven't had a normal week here because of Catholic Schools week activities but we are on target.  We will still plan on spelling post test and end of week test tomorrow.  Our story this week was Harvesting Hope the story of Cesar Chavez.  I tells about his journey in protecting migrant farmers.  We also hit a hard topic in grammar discussing independent clauses, dependent clauses, relative pronouns and relative adverbs.  Wow, don't those sound heavy!?  They are.  We will see tomorrow how well we get it.  One more week with a story and then we will be taking a unit test.  

Math - We needed to go back and review a couple topics this past week.  They were estimating products and partial product.  We have now moved on.  I taught them the standard algorithm to multiplication.  This was a 2 digit number by a single digit number.  We have now moved to a 3 digit number.  We just went over partial product and will practice it again tomorrow.  Next week we will move onto the standard algorithm for the 3 digit number.  They understand each strategy but have a hard time keeping them straight.  When I ask you to use partial product what do you do?  If I show them do it this way they totally get it.  I am trying to stress what each of them are called as we do them so they know the difference.  This can be confusing.

Social Studies - We are getting closer to projects being due.  If your child has a person or poster they need to get them poster board to me, so we can trace their state.  If you have cake I will try to get these out today or tomorrow.  We are talking about the people and events that shaped the Southeast Region.  Right now our discussion is on the Cherokee.  They are only Native Americans to have a written language.  Sequoya was the Native American to create a Cherokee alphabet.  This language is still being shared in schools in North Carolina where the Cherokee still live today.  We also discussed the government making them leave their lands and taking the "Trail of Tears" to Oklahoma where they were given a reservation to live on.  We will be skimming the topic of the Civil War next week.


We are all saddened that the weather didn't cooperate for us to take our trip to Des Moines.  We will still get to go, just not today. 

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels