Highlights from Week 14!

Only one more week until winter break! I cannot believe how fast the first trimester of school has gone by and it is almost 2014! Seeing that it is the holiday season, we are celebrating with some fun activities and treats during the last week before break. We will be decorating gingerbread houses and making hot chocolate in our classroom among other activities. Thank you to families who have helped to bring some of the supplies for our gingerbread houses - you can see the finished product when students take them home next week :)

Next week will be our first week to welcome Mrs. Froberg officially to our classroom as our student teacher. She will join us every day next week to get to know students and help out in our room. In January, she will come once a week (every Thursday) until March, and then finish the year off with us full-time. We are all very excited to welcome her and have an additional teacher in our classroom! Mrs. Froberg will be sending out an introductory letter next week so you can learn more about her soon.

Highlights:
-This is our last week writing our last narrative piece, and January will be the start of a new non-fiction writing unit! It will support our non-fiction reading unit as well as our Genius Hour research that will be happening in the next few weeks.
-Next Friday, we will have our unit test on multiplication/division. We will be working on the study guide early in the week, and students will be able to take it home so parents can get a chance to see what will be expected on the test. Please continue to help your child practice their multiplication facts so that the longer multiplication/division problems can be solved more easily/fluently.
-We are building our reading stamina in non-fiction. We learned a few strategies such as marking up a text, how to read text features and identify them. If you can, please show your child all the different non-fiction text that are all around them (menus, brochures, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, how-to manuals, etc).
-Most students have decided on their Genuis Hour topics! Please talk to your child about their chosen topic and how you might be able to support them in the research process.

*Apologies for not having pictures this week, but it just flew by! Many pictures to come in the next post :)