Dear Parents,
     Happy Holidays!! I hope all of you had a very happy Thanksgiving.  We did.  We had a nice trip to Chicago.  We enjoyed some shopping on Friday.  Macy's was my favorite black Friday shopping!!  They had some great deals.  I have a good start to my Christmas shopping.  I am almost done.  Now, I am looking for specific things.  The rest of the month will go quickly.  We are gearing up for Christmas but at school we are still working very hard.  We will work as hard as we can up to that very last week.  On the last day we are hear we will finish up some important stuff but then have fun and celebrate the season with one another.  We will be adding a tree to our wing tomorrow.  Kids are creating ornaments to put on them.  

Language Arts - This week we are reading a story called  The Earth Dragon Awakes.  This is a story about the Earthquake in San Francisco, California in April of 1906.  We consider this Historical Fiction because it is about a true event in History.  The destruction is real, but the actual story of a father Ah Sing and son Chin was fiction.  It is kind of a scary story thinking about being in a real earthquake and being trapped beneath rubble.  There were real pictures from that day added in also.  We have focused on visualizing this week.  Students chose a scene out of their book report books and drew a picture of what was happening.  They shared in their groups.  Fun activity.  In grammar we are focusing on  possessive nouns.  They are getting familiar with the apostrophe again.  They are learning about singular possessive nouns and plural possessive nouns.  Our spelling list and decoding this week go hand in hand.  The spelling list was on words ending in -ed and -ing.  They had to either drop an e before adding the endings or they needed to double a consonant.  We talked about how that works and how to find the base word when we remove the ending sound.  Tomorrow is our weekly assessment.  They should be studying their spelling words and vocabulary.

Math -  We just started chapter 3.  I would love to have it done by Christmas but that may not happen.  We have jumped up into double-digit multiplication.  Ms. Sherrod taught the first lesson and did an EXCELLENT job.  We covered the first part of lesson 2 today which is on estimating products which they find very easy.  Since they estimate every answer before they find the real answer they enjoy this lesson cause they don't know how to find the exact answer yet.  We will continue to practice out multiplication basic facts also.  I am so excited we are learning this content earlier in the year than I used to teach!!

Social Studies- We are getting closer to our first due dates!! Social studies projects will soon be in our halls.  I am pumped to see them!!  We have learned about land forms and resourced in the Northeast.  My favorite fact is that out of 1,000 cranberry bogs in the United States, 500 of them are in Massachusetts.  Not a very big state to have that many!!  We will be finishing up  this chapter soon and taking another test before Christmas Break.  We will even get the next chapter started before we take off.  Again, I said we are going to work hard and get as much done as we can, as long as we are learning!!

Please remember book orders are due tomorrow.  Let me know if you are ordering for gifts.  There were a lot of great things in the book orders!! I love the Holiday order.  The Hunger Games Foil box set would make a great gift.  I always push for kids to read the books because they are so much better than the movies.  I started reading the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone book out loud and they are really enjoying it because it has so much more than the movie.  They all say, that didn't happen!!  Send in your orders if you have them!! Thank you!

Have a great weekend!

God Bless, 
Mrs.Sickels