Week of Oct. 28th

Welcome back to school!  I hope you had a great week off.  I know we all appreciate breaks, but I am actually so excited to get this week started.  Here's all the fun stuff we will be starting this week:

Spelling
The kids informed me that they really loved being able to pick their spelling words last time.  My goal is to make things meaningful and enjoyable at school so they retain the information.  From now on, we will be picking our spelling words on Mondays.  There will always be separate lists that I check before they are set in stone.  We will have a few simpler words that the book provides to work on phonics skills, but your kids seem to grasp this pretty well.  I will also be adding a couple bonus words that we use for vocabulary each week.  The spelling lists will be put up on Mondays after our Reading class from now on.

Reading/Writing
This week we are discussing wolves.  We will look at fictional and non-fictional readings about wolves.  The kids will need to write a fairy tale with a wolf/wolves as the main characters.  The other characters in the story must be only animals.  Their rough draft will be due on Wednesday.  I would like their final drafts by next Monday.  More specifics on Fairy Tales/rubrics will be sent home in their folders.  

Science
We are doing science during 2nd quarter and our first unit will be on weather.  Your kids are going to be taking what they learn in this unit to create and present a weather forecast.  This will take the place of a formal test.  Most of this work will be done in school and it will take us 2-3 weeks to complete.  I will send home more information as needed.  This project idea was inspired by this funny video clip that I stumbled upon.  Here it is if you'd like something fun to watch!

9 year old weather forecaster

Thanks all of you for coming to our conferences!  You have no idea how much that meant to them that you were there.