Happy Thanksgiving!

One of the things I am very thankful for this time of year is my job and being able to work with such a great group of students and fellow teachers every day.  I am also very thankful for the help and support from their families at home.  I hope everyone has a great holiday with their families and gets some time to rest and recharge.

Our class completed some turkey center pieces for your festive tables which included 6 different things they were thankful for.  We also did some non-fiction reading about Thanksgiving traditions in our history.  Take some time to ask your student what new facts they learned about things that surround this holiday.

Tuesday marked the last day of first trimester!  To make sure we are starting the 2nd trimester off in the right direction, we took some time in class to make some reading goals for ourselves.  The students looked at data from their benchmark test to determine two skills they are going to focus on and practice while reading.  They also made a plan for the first three genres of books they will be finishing this new trimester.

We finished up grading our compare and contrast essays and they will be coming home on Monday.  Please take some time to review your child's writing with him/her.  They worked very hard on these as we took steps through the whole writing process together.

Next week we will be working on forming questions before, during and after reading to check for comprehension.  This will incorporate all of the comprehension strategies we have been working on so far.  We will also be reviewing some of our decoding and vocabulary strategies.  My hope is to connect with each reader in the next couple of weeks to determine if their good fit reading level needs to be adjusted.  They are very excited to see how their practice has been improving their reading abilities and scores!

New reading/math fact logs went home yesterday and will be due next Friday.  The goals will remain 120 for reading and 50 for math.

They will be taking the Unit 4 math test towards the end of this week.

Have a wonderful, safe Thanksgiving!  Thank you for all you do and for shaping your students into the wonderful people they are:)