Dear Parents,

      Happy Thursday!!  I hope everyone is having a great week!  This seems like it has been a crazy week! I have had 2 students online due to not feeling well and one that was gone the end of the week.  Wednesday I only had 2 students in class with me.  That was a weird day.  I hope that next week I have all 5 back with us.  I do understand if your child is really stuffed up and sneezing or blowing their nose a ton and you choose to keep them home.  I am fine with it.  Being online works well! I will have information on Halloween and what we are going to do for it next week in my blog!

Language Arts -This week we are back to reading a story in our textbook and completing spelling.  The story we are reading this week is called Invasion From Mars.  It is a fun "true" story of an event that happened.  On October 30, 1938,  a radio was broadcasting a reading of "The War of the Worlds".  A book written by H.G. Wells.  The section they were reading that day was on an extraterrestrial object landing on earth.  People who did not hear the introduction and turned on the radio in the middle of the broadcast became frantic.  They were thinking the broadcast was really happening.  It caused quite a panic for some.  We have read the story.  Today I plan to have them listen to the live broadcast of this.  They will then see why some Americans thought it was truly happening.  You can search it on Youtube and find it.  My classes really love this story because there is a good story behind it.  In grammar we have started working on verbs.  We talked about action verbs, helping verbs and main verbs, then linking verbs.  The vocabulary strategy was on the suffixes -y, and -ous.  Tomorrow is a normal Friday.  We have a spelling post test and end of the week test.  Be sure they are studying their yellow packets tonight!

Math -  We are beginning our chapter on Multiplication!  This will be a very long chapter.  I will teach the students several different strategies to work multiplication problems.  The exciting part of this is, we know when we grew up we only learned one way to multiply.  Not everyone understood how to do this way.  Kids struggled to learn and be very good at multiplication because they didn't understand.  I understand what I needed to do to manipulate the numbers and get my answers but I never understood exactly how it worked.  I will be teaching your students several strategies to help them understand what they are doing.  I know they are strategies you struggle with and I don't want you to stress over helping them.  I am here before school everyday and usually here after school until at least 4:30 unless Molly has an event.  I will be glad to be the one that helps your student.  I personally like the strategy of "Partial Product" much better than the standard algorithm.  It is so much easier to understand and find mistakes.  This is my favorite chapter to teach in the year.  I will make your children masters of multiplication when we are done.  WOOHOO! 

Social Studies - We are learning about the Northeast this week.  We have learned the location of Niagara Falls.  We talked about it's beauty and its power resource.  They learned that something beautiful can be of great use.  Hydropower plants are generating hydroelectricity to help give energy to the state of New York. We also talked about how glaciers played a huge role in the formation of Niagara Falls.  We also have looked at the different mountain ranges found in the Northeast and how they are important to the skiing industry.  I plan to compare the difference between the Main coastline and the New Jersey coastline.  We will finish up this lesson and then we will put our first state into our interactive notebooks.  They are excited about this!  They think getting to color, cut and paste in Social Studies is super fun!

HELP!!  HELP!!  HELP!!   We are going to run out of wipes next week.  So if anyone could purchase some wipes to send in that would be great.  The students each use 2 wipes a day.  They wipe down at lunch and then at the end of the day.  With only 5 kids 5 bottles didn't go very far.   Thanks for all and any help!

Spirit Day!   Tomorrow is a Spirit Day!   You can wear sweats or a hat for a $1.00.  Perfect day for it   Bring those dollars and be comfy! 

I am headed to Denison today for a Cross Country meet.  It is a long drive to watch someone run 20 minutes.  This could be her last time running though.  She has to run well to get to run in the State Qualifying Meet next Thursday.  If she does not run well, she will be done. Since she is a senior I just can't miss it.  I am listening to a book as I drive.  I am excited because I have not listened since last Thursday.  It is read by a person with a British accent so I am struggling to pick up on everything.  Wish us luck!  Have a great weekend!

God Bless,

Mrs. Sickels