Dear Parents and Guardians,

Please forgive me for not updating you last week. This was an oversight on my part. I thought I had updated my blog, however I guess I went on vacation a week before it actually occurred.

On Thursday of this week, Ray School will hold it's annual festival. I am hoping our class will be able to participate. There is so much to do as this is report card time. I will try my best to have our class  participate.  If our classroom does participate, I will need the students to take turns working the booth of our activity. I am thinking we will do a competitive activity to be held in the gym.  We will have competition between partners in activites such as racing, finding something blindfolded etc. I will provide more details to the class so they can share them with you before that time.

I'd like to thank you for supporting your child in writing their stories for Young Author's book.  I think the stories and poems this year were some of the best I have seen. I could actually "hear" the voices of our students in their writing. The children seemed to really enjoy writing their stories and poems. I was thrilled to see how focused the stories were and how imaginative they were. I think we have some author's in our mist. Le's keep our children motivated and writing to share their creative ideas with others.

This week we will be working on the following:

LANGUAGE ARTS:

We will be reading "Johnny Appleseed" in  our OpenCourt readers. We will discuss the genre of legends and how real people  and their deeds can become  heroes in stories that are handed down and become a part of a culture. We will think of a modern day person that we can "legendize." We will write and share our own legends about someone we think would make a good legend.

SPELLING: We will examine words that begin with an /s/ and words that have the /j/ sound.

SPELLING WORDS:  since, sauce, safe, sink, nice, gym, germ, age, gentle, hinge, cellar, second, cider, largest.

GRAMMAR:  We will practice capitalizing special names and words.

MATH: We will continue to work on extending multiplication  and division facts. For example if we know that 7 x 6= 42, then we know 70 x 6 = 420 and 700 x 6= 4,200. The same holds true for the same numbers using division.  Obviously it is necessary for the students to know their basic multiplication facts to be able to do extended facts. We will also explore furthur making estimations. As I always remind the students, sometimes it is necessary to estimate how much something will cost or how much change you will receive or any other basis where making an estimate is necessary. For example, if I sent you to the store with $6.00, and you had to buy a loaf of bread for $1.85 and a half gallon of milk for $2.35, would you have enough money and approximately, how much change should you receive? You won't have a paper or pencil or calculator!

We will review for the Unit Seven test on Wednedsay and take the unit test on Thursday.

SOCIAL STUDIES:

We will continue to review landforms in our Map Essentials books as well as to learn the northeastern states. We will have a test on both on Thursday.

SCIENCE:

We will examine the residue from our mock rocks. We broke our rocks apart and the residue was put into a vial with water before break. The water evaporated and surprisingly left crystals of the salt and another element that made up our mock rocks; alumn, that appeared in a hexagonal shape. We will look at these elements in a petrie dish. We will have a short test on what we have learned about earth materials on Thursday.

<em>HAVE      A       GREAT         WEEK!</em>