Dear Parents,

     Happy Thursday!  This will be a short blog this week.  I have been at home all week.  I was just being precautionary with cold symptoms.  Come to find out I am positive for COVID.  I don't have many symptoms but losing taste and smell are the big ones and I have lost those.  My return date would be November 25th. So I will back in the classroom after Thanksgiving.  I have been teaching some classes from home which has been fun.  I feel like I am still there and a part of class if I can do that.  Today I bowed out of Language arts due to getting my test results and having to talk to public health.  This is all so very crazy!!

Language Arts - This week is the last story in Unit 2.  It is called Jose! Born to Dance.  This was a story that we enjoyed the first time but not really anytime after that.  It is about a famous dancer Jose Limon.  He is a real person and it tells his life story about what he went through to finally decide to become a dancer.  In grammar this week we are learning about pronouns.  We learned the subject and object pronouns, and also reflexive and demonstrative pronouns.  The vocabulary strategy this week was shades of meaning.  It is talking about synonyms having different shades of meaning.  If you think of the word big, you have lots of synonyms: huge, large, enormous, gigantic.  They are synonyms but we have a different picture of how big something is based on the word we use.  Students will need to be sure to practice their spelling words and vocabulary words tonight.  The end of the week test will be tomorrow.

Math -  This week they learned the regrouping strategy for multiplication which is the strategy you were all taught growing up.  Yesterday we focused on double-digit numbers times a single digit.  Today we moved up to digits in the hundreds and thousands.  We are almost finished with this chapter which is great!  The next chapter moves into double digits so we get even harder.  They are all doing very well.

Social Studies -  They have completed a test this week.  It has been  a crazy week to test and we went about it very differently but we made it through.  We will be beginning the next chapter today.  They will be putting another state into their interactive notebooks also.  Next week we are doing a Geography Bee.  We usually do this every year.  It is a national event.  The national event was cancelled due to COVID so we are holding our own at St. Malachy.  I will hold a mock geobee on Monday with them that I will be online conducting.  Then on Tuesday we will do the real thing.  It will take place in the morning.  I will run them through 7 rounds of questions.  I will get together with the other teachers 5-8 and we will compare our results and come up with a top ten.  Those top ten students will compete in the Championship round that we usually hold in December.  It is normally done differently but we are adjusting this year to follow our COVID rules. It will be fun!

This had totally been a crazy week for all of us!  I would like to hope this could all come to an end soon.  Pray for a vaccine and pray for those people who are not doing the right thing.  We have to stop the spread and we will only do it if we all just do what is right and asked of us.  Stay safe and everyone feel better!!

God Bless,

Mrs. Sickels