Weekly Update

Hi Everyone,

Happy Friday!  I hope it's been a good week!  After our first 5-day week in a while, we are ready for the weekend!

Quarter 1 Report Cards:
A friendly reminder that Quarter 1 report cards were issued Monday.  If you've not yet done so, please log into your ParentVue account to view your child's report card.

Thanksgiving Plate:
In last week's Thursday folder, I sent home a note about Thanksgiving, along with a "plate" for your child to decorate with things he/she is thankful for.  We will use the decorated plate for an in-class project.  Please help your child decorate his/her plate with pictures of things he/she is thankful for.  The plates will go through the laminator, so please use only flat decorations.  Please send the decorated plate back to school by this coming Monday, November 18th. If it is finished sooner, you may send it sooner.  Thank you!

School Picture Retakes:
School Picture Retakes will be Friday, November 22nd.  Picture retakes are for students who were absent on picture day, or students who paid for a picture package and would like to have the photos redone.  If you believe either of these apply to you, please send me a message and I will give you all the details about picture retakes.

Focus Areas for the Coming Week:

• Reading:  We will continue our Word Detectives unit.  We are learning ways to decode difficult words. Next week we will practice paying attention to word endings and vowel sounds.  We will find parts of words we know (for example, looking for a little work inside a big word), and pay attention to words that don't follow regular phonetic spelling patterns (like "have" or "of").  We will practice smoothing out our voices to read with fluency.
• Writing:  We will finish our How-to unit, in which we are teaching our readers how to do things.  We will start a few fun Thanksgiving writing activities. 
• Math:  We will begin our fractions unit.  We will talk about wholes and sets, and parts of wholes vs. parts of sets.  We will talk about the words numerator and denominator. We will practice identifying wholes, halves, thirds, and fourths.  We will practice writing fractions that represent fractions of sets and fractions of wholes. 
• Social Studies:  We will begin our economics unit.  We will explore the concepts of wants and needs (things we want to have versus things we need to stay healthy, safe, and alive), goods and services (goods are items people buy, and services are things we pay people to do), and consumers and producers (consumers are people who buy goods are services, producers are people who make goods or provide services) .

As always, I welcome your questions, comments, and feedback.

Winston's birthday is tomorrow.  He is our English Bulldog.  I am pretty sure we all love Winston more than we love each other.  We are going to use his birthday as an excuse to eat some yummy treats and enjoy some extra family time.  

Have a great weekend!