Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!!  What a great night Saturday night!!  I have never been to an auction that the generosity was at that level!!!  What an emotional night.  I feel our trunk was a big success!! It brought $1000.  I would like to thank all of you for your donations to make out items a success.  The 5th grade basket was huge success!!  Ms. Surma and I were completely overwhelmed.  We called it the roll-over basket!!  It sold 9 times and brought a total of $4900!! Incredible!!  Great great night for St. Malachy School!!

Math - We have begun chapter 6 on double-digit multiplication.  We are taking the whole thing slowly so that the kids are comfortable on each lesson before moving on.  I want them to have confidence before we hit the "hard" stuff.  I am making these first lessons light and fun to help boost that confidence.  We have talked about multiples of 10, 100, 1000 and estimating products.  We are going to do more with estimating today before we move on.  Next week we may learn partial product before spring break.  I don't plan on getting to the standard algorithm until after spring break.  Have them practice a few problems over break and definitely work on basic facts!!

Language Arts - We are reading a story about sequoia trees this week.  The title is The Ever-Living Tree.  This is a nonfiction story about a coast redwood tree and it's lifespan.  It compares the growing of the tree with other events in history going on at the same time.  The point is to show that this tree is very very old and they can relate because there are events from history that happened long ago.  In grammar we are discussing rules with capitalization and ending punctuation with quotations.  Our spelling list is again about a VCCV or vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel pattern.  This time when putting the words into syllables the split is not between the two consonants but before or after them.  

Social Studies - The students chose their states and projects for the Midwest Region yesterday.  They seemed pretty excited about what they got.  These projects will be due like the first to second week in April.  We have begun this chapter discussing the Great Lakes region.  They know how they were formed, that they are larges group of freshwater lakes in the world and what states touch them and are called Great Lake States.  We now will move to the Great Plains States.  We begin in South Dakota discussing the Badlands.  Please, send photos of vacations that you have taken in the Black Hills if you have been there. Kids love to share and I would love for those who haven't been to see first hand.  I have some from when I was this age, but the photos are bad because of film and cameras back then.

Have a great weekend!!

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels