Red Ribbon Week Begins!

This week is our annual Red Ribbon Week which emphasizes a healthy lifestyle by telling students to say NO to drugs and alcohol. We had a guest speaker, Officer Dixon, begin our week. Therefore, our math block was shortened.

During our math block the students were given time to complete the unit 1 assessment which they began on Friday. There is NO math homework tonight!

We began reading by continuing our shared reading of From Father to Son and listing the key words. Today we broadened our focus from individual sentences to paragraphs.

For independent work the students searched for 5 words with the -ie pattern and 5 words with the -ei pattern. This will be our next spelling focus. The children will receive their spelling homework sheet tomorrow.

Additionally, the students had to write a descriptive paragraph, using lots of sensory images, about their Halloween costume for this year, or a past costume. I stressed to the students that this will be their final writing score for this year, so they needed to put effort into it. This piece will NOT go through the formal writing process. It is the children's chance to get one more writing grade and to show what they have learned. Students will turn it in during the week but it must be turned in by the end of the day Thursday.

I met with all three reading groups today and did the same lesson with each, using their group's book. With each group we reviewed their chart of contractions and unknown words from class on Friday. With the contractions we also reviewed that not all words that use apostrophes are contractions, some show possession. Regarding the unknown words, we practiced using the glossary and context clues (as a group) to determine the meanings, when appropriate.

The ONLY homework, from my class, tonight is to finish their book report. It is due tomorrow!

Following lunch and recess the children will go to art. After that, we will list what we know and what we want to learn about geography. From there we will move onto the difference between physical and human characteristics of geography, which we have touched on before.