Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!!!  This has been a busy week.  I went to the Civic Center last night to see Dirty Dancing and it was FABULOUS!!!  It was a very late night though.  I am yawning today.  Tonight I am off to Denison for volleyball.  I am ready for this week to be over!  The week has been much better homework wise.  They are working very hard.  I have a "study group" that takes their work to the neighboring room and works.  They are monitored by the Ms. Thomas, our aide.  They enjoy this time and accomplish a lot.  Things are gradually becoming more routine.  Those first 3-4 weeks can be stressful for everyone.  

Language Arts -  This week we read a story called "My Librarian Is A Camel".  It is an informational story. I find it very interesting.  It tells us about communities that are far away from a major city or isolated, and how they get to enjoy library books.  In Africa, they are delivered by camel.  In Finland, it's by boat, in Northern Canada it is by the mail.  The kids find the idea interesting but the reading is dry and hard for them to stay focused on.  We will cover this story again tomorrow right before they test over it.  In spelling this week the skill was focusing on long i and short i.  The grammar focus was on quotation marks.  We worked on how to correctly punctuate a quote from someone.  This can be very tricky.  The students seemed to do well. The test will be challenging.  The decoding lesson this week was over VCCV patterns.  You should find the test results of last Friday's end of the week test will be found in today's take home folder.  They are for you, I have the originals here at school.

Math - In math this week, we have been working on comparing and ordering numbers and also rounding numbers.  We are struggling with rounding numbers so we are going to spend some extra time on it.  I am not comfortable leaving this until I know everyone has a handle on it.  We will then have a MId-Chapter checkpoint.  This means we are halfway through the chapter.  We will have 4 more lessons then get ready to assess our knowledge.  I use the MId-Chapter checkpoint to see if there is anything in the first 4 chapters I may need to go back and touch on again with certain students before moving forward.  We have been doing a lot of group work in Math to try and share ideas with each other.  Sometimes other student'st thoughts might trigger something for someone else who wasn't quite getting it.  Today I have a couple games planed for some groups so they hopefully are either practicing their rounding or still working on learning rounding.

Social Studies - We are getting ready for our first test.  They worked on a study guide today.  We will check it tomorrow and they will test on Monday.  Tuesday we will correct the tests and begin the next chapter.  Chapter 2 will talk about our government, and our economic system.  There is a lot to learn in this chapter.  Sometimes it is a hard chapter to teach because there is so much you want the kids to remember.  In all honesty, they probably won't find it interesting.  I will be looking for ways to present it to them that is interesting.  

I hope all of you have a great weekend!! I will spend Saturday in the Red Oak High School gym watching volleyball.  Sunday will be a day to myself!! Woohoo!! I will try to catch up on all the housework, and laundry that I fell behind on during the week.  I am usually checking Friday Language Arts tests also!!  I pray the balloons can go up and I get to see some.  Sometimes on the way to or from Red Oak we see them flying.  I just hope the weather allows them to go up.

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels