What a great week we had last week. The school-wide election was a great success. The children had a great time and were very organized and professional.
If you haven’t heard: John McCain won with 54% of the votes.

Spelling: We will be working on the pages from our workbook, form “Boss of the Plains.” We read this story last week and They will also have 5 sentences to write on lined paper, using the spelling words. The sentences are also due on Friday. (The sentences need to be done in cursive.)

Reading: We will be starting our next novel this week, one of my favorites, War with Grandpa. I will not tell you about the book yet. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. We will still be working on reading short stories form our second anthology section.

We will again, be writing long answer questions in our journal for this novel. A major reminder to everyone is that we can and should go back into the story to provide evidence for our answers.

The steps to answer a question are:
1. Restate the question
2. Answer the question
3. Support you answer with evidence from the story

This skill is of great importance in my classroom.

Written Language: We are going to continue to work on some skills this week; subject/predicate, combining sentences with a conjunction, parts of speech, and plurals. We need to review these skills so that, they are more automatic. I will also be spending time


Math: We are continuing with our mini unit on geometry. The more the children use the vocabulary, the better they will understand it. So, I have decided to create a mini geometry dictionary. They have already entered all the geometry words into their little blue math notebooks, but I think to have one at home would be extremely beneficial. We will be creating the dictionary this week. We are almost ready for a short quiz on geometry and then we will work into graphing and money. I need to go out of order and start a money unit, because my class is in charge of the School Store.

All our math concepts, will not be taught in isolation. Everything in math builds on the previous day or concept. That is why it is still imperative to stay focused and participate.

DCR UPDATE: This is an independent math packet that reviews all the concepts and skills we will be using throughout the year. The children should be pacing themselves, 3-5 pages per week. I give them a weekly check on the board and they should be on pages 31 - 46 as of Friday 11/07/08. There are 3 packets, one for each term. They need to try to finish one packet each term. They do not need to go ahead. It is not a race.

Application of facts and terminology is key to success in math.

Science: We continue to work through our unit on “Land and Water”. Each week we will be conducting hands on experiments and observing what is happening with our cliff, inside our stream table. We will also be learning new vocabulary and adding that to our discussions. I have the children draw and label what they have done for each lesson. On the other side of their drawing, I also have the children write a detailed observation as to what happened during the lesson. I have instructed them to use the newly acquired vocabulary and the old vocab , from past lessons in their writing. This makes it easier to write about what they see and I can judge whether or not the have grasped the new concepts and vocab. This is as major piece of the the Land and Water unit. It is all hands on with many new vocabulary words. We are almost done with this unit. We probably have 4 or 5 more lessons to do.


Social Studies: We are finishing up our unit on government. We will have a short quiz sometime next week. The children already have the double sided study guide to assist them in reviewing what we have already learned and discussed at length on government. We will be moving on to the Southeast.

Projects: We will begin discussions this week on creating our first “Talking Calendar” I will demonstrate the process in class and then assign the project for later in November, 19th. The children have already researched their topic in school. I have given them all the material to write a short paragraph or two on their topic. They need to design a cover and fill in the back of the card. I have given them 2 cards to create their Talking Calendar.


Thanks, Mr. L.