Dear Parents,
     Hello!!  Happy Thursday!  I am so sorry I blew off writing a parent letter last week.  The short week just totally threw me off.  This short week is also throwing me off.  The kids are actually handling all these short weeks better than I am.  I sometimes feel like life is crazy in the classroom!! I know they enjoy my craziness sometimes.  The question is can we handle a full couple of weeks??

Conferences - Conferences are coming up quickly.  They are Thursday, Nov. 3rd.  I have sent out the schedule for sign up to your emails.  Please be sure to check it out.  I opened up some extra spots on Tuesday and Wednesday. Please only sign up here if you really have a conflict with Thursday.  I know I had a parent that will be out of town on business on Thursday and that is why I did this.  I am anxious to meet with all of you to discuss how your child is adapting to my classroom.

Language Arts -  I am trying something very different this Unit.  I am working on figuring out how to use the online assessment tools that are offered to us.  The students took last week's end of the week test online.  You will not be receiving any test results from last weeks test because I am still learning.  This week I will be sure to have the results for you.  The story they read this week was called Coming Distractions.  It talks about things in movies that don't make sense in real life.  Examples would be in Charlie's Angels the women fight in high heels, when a parent loses a job they still drive fancy cars and live in big houses, and when cars crash people walk away from them unscathed.  These are just a few things that show how movies can be meant to be realistic yet be so unrealistic.  They like talking about movies and certain scenes but reading about this stuff wasn't very interesting to them.  Their favorite activity we did this week was I played a theme song to a movie and they had to guess the movie.  This was fun.  Of course they knew Titanic, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Jaws, and Pretty Little LIars, but didn't know Superman, Hunger Games, and Avengers.  They have asked to do more of that every day!  In grammar this week we reviewed verb tenses, Past, Present and Future.  We made decisions on what tense sentences were in and what verbs should be used.  We talked about being consistent with verbs.  If one is future tense in a sentence then they all should be.  We also learned about helping verbs and past participle.  This is a past tense verb that has a helping verb in front of it.  Students need to study spelling words and their vocabulary words tonight for end of the week test.

Math -  We are working through chapter 2 in math.  I feel like it is progressing quite nicely so far.  Every day we stress the importance of paying attention in class and doing what is asked of us.  Participation is also the key to success.  I feel like they are really listening and trying to do this.  We have finished 3 lessons in this chapter so far.  I feel like they are really catching on.  I plan to keep moving at a good pace to keep them learning and understanding.  This chapter can drag on forever and I don't want to do that with them.  We need to keep moving.  I am thinking the ST Math we do 3 times a week is helping this process also.  One thing that you could do at home is practice multiplication facts!  The quicker they are and the more they know their facts the easier this will be.  We will find some days here where we work flash cards with a partner.  The more practice at home the better.

Social Studies  We have finished up chapter 2 and will be taking a test on Monday.  This chapter covered a lot of areas.  The most important being the lesson on Government.  We learned about the 3 branches and the 3 levels, which is review from 3rd grade but we also talked a little deeper,learning what each branch does.  You will find in their notebooks where they took their own notes over what they read.  We also talked about theories of how Native Americans got to America, you will find notes in the notebook on these 2 theories.  The third thing was explorers.  They learned about a few explorers that came to explore.  You will also find a chart in their notebooks on this.  They did a lot of reading and looking for information this chapter.  They really liked to be in charge of what they were to look for. They got more out of the lesson reading with someone finding answers and then sharing in discussion with the whole group.  This was all something new for me to try with students and they seemed to thrive on it.  I hope this test shows that what we did was useful!

I hope all of you have a great weekend!  Remember to sign up for a conference time!!!  

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels