Welcome back from your Thanksgiving holiday--I hope that you and your families are all well. We have three full weeks of school until our Christmas holiday--these three weeks will be full of learning and Christmas activities.
Here are this week's happenings:
- I have decided to change the way I have you report your child's nightly reading. If you recall I have been working on my Master's thesis this semester (I just turned it in yesterday!!). From that study I found a positive correlation between rereading books at home on your child's reading fluency. I also learned through the surveys that there are too many places to report your child's reading--the book in the bag sheet, PTA bookmarks and my reading calendar. I am going to cut that back for you by just having you fill out the sheet in the take home books bag. When your child bumps up a level then I will give them a certificate, treat, and pizza coupon. I will no longer send home monthly reading calendars in addition to the take home books reporting sheet. Since I already sent home the November calendar that will be due by this Friday, December 4 for a certificate, treat and pizza coupon. The students that have already bumped up a level will also get that so some students may be receiving two this month :). I hope that helps you with the reporting not occurring in three different places. I still would hope that you would read with your child every school night even though we do not have take home books 5 times a week this year.
- If you haven't signed up for East Elementary's REMIND please do that now--I do not send home announcements that get sent home that way. One was just sent home today. Sign up by texting @cedareas to the number 81010.
- In math this week we are finishing up our unit on two-dimensional shapes. Today we learned about halves and tomorrow we will learn about fourths/quarters. On Wednesday we will start our chapter on three-dimensional shapes. We will learn about attributes of three-dimensional shapes and combine them to create different shapes as well as take them apart.
- In reading we have learned both of the sounds and spellings for 'oo' (soon and book). Today we learned about the 'ou' sound. We read a Fable called The Two Mules. Tomorrow we will read the fable the Dog and the Mule. This month we will learn a lot about reindeer and write factual sentences about them. I hope you saw your child's turkey art and sentences that came home today. We are getting so much better at writing sentences. Rather than students saying "Mrs. Armstrong how do you spell this...." I hear them sounding out the words as they spell them.
- Next week students will have their middle of the year reading test (DIBELS). We will not have reading groups next week due to this. I will let you know those results as soon as I can. We use the data from this test to form our small reading groups.
- Also in reading we are reading different versions of famous stories. We first read Cinderella and told read the version from Egypt The Girl and the Red Slippers. We talked about story elements (characters, setting, and plot) from each of those stories and compared and contrasted the two stories using a Venn diagram.
- We had a nice surprise from "Mr. Russ" across the street last Tuesday. I took the notes that we wrote him on Monday and on Tuesday he had some yummy cookies delivered to our classroom from the Palette bakery. We even shared some with Mrs. Carter's class. I think this experience has been a good one for my students. Showing someone you are thinking about them and being kind is a life lesson we all need especially at this time of the year.
Happy almost December and Happy Reading,
Mrs. Armstrong
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