Dear Parents, 
     Happy Thursday!!!  We are surviving our first full week in a very long time!!!  Only to be given a "Crazy" week next week.  We have Halloween activities on Monday and then we are out extra early on Thursday so we can hold conferences. I hope all of you have signed up for time slot to meet with me.  I am looking forward to discussing your child with you!  The rest of this year will move along very quickly.  Once conferences are here it pretty much the end.  After conferences we have 2 short weeks til Thanksgiving, then Advent starts and Christmas is just around the corner!  Then BOOM! it's 2017.  So crazy to think half the year would be over.  

Conferences -  I have sent out a link to your emails to sign up for conferences.  There are still about 9 of you who have not signed up.  You may just need to check your emails.  If your are having trouble with signing up please call the school and let the office help you.  I have lots of times on Thursday still open.  I appreciate all of you who have all ready singed up. I will see you next week!

Language Arts -  This week we have read a story called Me and Uncle Romie.  It is realistic fiction.  It is a fun story about a boy who goes to stay with his Aunt and Uncle because his parents are having twins.  He is from North Carolina and is going to stay in New York City.  He learns a lot.  It is a very fun loving story.  We have worked on visualizing as our skill.  The grammar we are focusing on this week was about progressive verbs.  These verbs have a helping verb in front of the main verb and the main verb ends in -ing.  The helping verb decides the verb tense, whether it is past, present, or future.  We also talked about figurative language this week.  Idioms was our focus.  Phrases that mean something different then what the words really mean.  Examples would be "Good as gold, hang in there, safe and sound, chow down, and head over heals".  We practiced putting them into sentences. As always tomorrow is our end of the week assessment and spelling test!  Please be sure your child studies.

Math- We have begun learning strategies to multiplication.  Yesterday we learned the expanded form strategy.  I really like this one.  It breaks the number down so we can easily get the answer.  They actually learned 2 ways to use expanded form, the used an area box which they all really liked because it provided a visual for them.  They also learned just a written form.  This form is a form of Algebra.  Once we learned how to do it I told them they just learned Algebra.  They were excited and amazed.  I told them that was exactly why I didn't tell them up front they would be learning algebra today.  They would have had a little panic in them.  When you tell them after it's done they have that sense of "Wow, I can do it!"  For a teacher this is the best part. We will also learn partial product before the week is up which is similar to what we are doing, it is just recorded differently.  This strategy is the way I prefer to do multiplication.  I understand what I am doing better than the standard algorithm which is what you learned in school.  The students are doing a great job listening and participating in math and we are moving very smoothly through this chapter which tends to drag on and on.  We are coming up to some times that we miss a lot of time to teach math, but I plan to keep our momentum going.

Social Studies -  We just finished Chapter 2.  The students began chapter 3 today.  We completed a vocabulary preview page and began putting vocabulary words into our packets.  This is a very important chapter which focuses on the United State's Economy.  We will learn a lot of big vocabulary words explaining our country's economic system and how it works.  This is the last chapter we have based on the United States as a whole.  The chapters to follow will be designated on a certain region.  We will study the Northwest Region first.  This is also means our social projects will begin.  These are fun projects the students do to share information about a state.  I will discuss these briefly at conferences next week!

I hope all of you have a great weekend!! I am excited about the football game!!
 GO PANTHERS!!  In honor of the football game tomorrow is a FREE spirit day!!! You can wear all your PANTHER gear including sweatpants for free tomorrow.  Let's rock the red and black so I can take a group photo!!!

God Bless, 
Mrs. Sickels