September 26-30

The boys and girls had a great time last week!!  Between experimenting with their solar cookers, taking a community walk to McDonalds, and ending the week with the Lap-A-Thon, I would say that it was an enjoyable week for each of them! 

REWARD-- The class has been earning letters to spell the word 'reward'. They got their final letter last week.  As a class, we decided for our reward to be a movie party.  We will be watching the movie Charlotte's Web this Friday.  The students are allowed to wear their pajamas also! 
They want to bring treats that can be shared with the class.  So, if you would like to send a bag of chips or cookies or a baked good to class, we will set them out for all the kids to have a buffet of treats to choose from while watching the movie.

This week will be a little less 'event'-ful, but also full of learning!

Reading
We will complete Theme 3, What is Light?, on Friday with a Theme Test.  We will continue to practice making inferences and writing good questions about the text that we read. 

Small Group books should have come home on Friday.  The boys and girls will bring one of these home every week and are expected to read it to an adult over the weekend. 

Reading logs will continue to be collected every Monday and/or Tuesday.  This is part of our school-wide reading program.  Please make sure your child reads and turns in his or her minutes.  If you do not have a reading log at home, simply write the minutes on a piece of paper.

Spelling
The spelling patterns for the week are:
  1.  Digraphs- ch, sh, th, and wh
  2.  Prefix- "uni-" which means 'one'.

Math
The kiddos did really well last week learning about addition.  This week our focus will be on subtraction.
  *Subtracting with expanded algorithm
  *Models for Subtracting
  *Subtracting 3-digit numbers
  *Subtracting across zeros
  *Problem solving

Writing
The students began drafting a sequence of events last week. This week we will continue through the writing process to draft, edit and revise those sequences.

Science
We completed our solar energy unit last week with our solar cookout.  We have one last culminating project for our solar energy unit, which will be coming home today.  The boys and girls will be creating a solar house--on their own at home.  The directions and examples will be coming home today.  The houses are due October 24th.

We will spend this week learning about Stars and the Moon.