Weekly Update

Hi Everyone,

Happy Friday! I hope it has 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 on 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 projects will go through the laminator so, please use only flat pictures or decorations. Please send the decorated plate back to school by this coming Monday, November 18th. Thank you!

Reading Homework:
I have noticed that many students are not reading each night. This could be that they are forgetting to complete their daily reading homework along with a page in the homework packet, or parents are forgetting to sign their agenda. I kindly ask that you please sign your child's agenda each night. I check student agendas every morning and if there is not a signature, then I mark that your child does not have their homework completed. There is a homework completion portion of the report card and your child's nightly reading counts towards that.

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 have paid for a picture package and would like to have the photos redone. If you believe either of those apply to you, please send me a message and I will give you 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. (Please be sure to ask your child about the strategies they are learning and encourage them to try them at home). 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 word 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 to do things. We will also start a few fun Thanksgiving writing activities. 
• Math- We will begin our fractions unit. We will talk about a 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 vs. things we need to stay healthy, safe, and alive), goods and services (goods are things that people buy, services are things we pay people to do for us), and consumers and producers (consumers are people who buy/use goods and services, producers are people who make goods or provide services). 

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

I hope that you all have a wonderful weekend!