I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas! I will be back over the vacation week to update with some pictures from before the holiday break. :)

Challenge

Last week we started a new unit in Writer's Workshop called"Authors as Mentors". In this unit we will study authors and learn about some of their crafts they use in their writing and their purpose. We will try these crafts in our own stories! Please ask your child what the real grown up word for the ... (dot, dot, dot) is and what its purpose is. Please email me their answer for a little prize!

Family Visitors and Thanksgiving!

I have many pictures to post from when we had parents and family in to visit their children for American Education week, as well as some from our learning during Thanksgiving week! Also, I will be sending home a notice regarding winter "holiday craft workshops" in the coming days!

Conferences

Hi everyone!
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I have lots of pictures to post soon but I did want to just let you know that I was going through my conference sign ups from Open House and there are several parents that did not sign up for one. I will be in touch this week with the times that I have left on the two conference half days that we have. I will have some flexibility if needed. Thank you!

FYI and a Challenge

Please check your child's sight word notebook after they finish writing. I do not expect unfamiliar words to be spelled correctly and I encourage phonetic spelling for those words. I do expect students to trace and write the sight word neatly at the top as well as write a neat sentence that includes a capital letter and punctuation. :)

If you have not sent in the form to let me know about being able to come in on Wednesday, please send in tomorrow. 

Challenge: In Reader's Workshop the students have been working hard at getting to know their characters. Please ask your child to tell one way they can get to know their character. Email me their answer for a small prize. 

Thank You!

Reader's Workshop

In Reader's Workshop we began a new unit to study characters in the stories that we read. We have been talking about acting as detectives to get to know them so well that we feel like they are our friends. Students are learning to jot their thinking about the characters on post-it notes to mark their thinking and share with their reading buddies. Here are some pictures of students working on this. I also included some recent learning about nouns as well.

Halloween Craft Workshops

Thank you so much to the parents that were able to come in on Friday to organize a craft for the students. They had a great time and made so many cute things! Here are some pictures!