October 28th ~ November 1st

Fall is in the air and you can smell the leaves ~ I hope you enjoyed the beautiful weekend.

Conference Confirmation Slips: These will go home on Wednesday and I am looking forward to visiting with you about your child.

Personal Safety Lesson: Both grades will attend the personal safety lessons presented by our school counselor, Mrs. Tatum. The 5th graders will meet on Monday at 10:00 and the 6th graders will meet at 2:15 on Wednesday.

Halloween Treats? - If you would like to provide some type of treat for our class for Halloween, let me know. I will set aside the last few minutes on Thursday for a treat if one is provided. Send me an email if you are interested in providing something. If we have a volunteer, I will send a group email to let you know . . so we don't end up with an overload of goodies.

We have had a busy birthday month in our room - and we have two birthdays this week. Seth's is Monday and Dacee's is on Wednesday. Zoe's birthday was on the 1st and Quinn's was the 22nd. Birthday treats galore!

Our annual Yellowstone Art Museum presentation for the 5th graders is on Friday at 9:30 and they will head to Mrs. Saur's room with the other 5th graders. The 6th grade presentation will be scheduled at a later date.

Spelling: Unit 7 - We will take a pretest on Monday, work with the words throughout the week, and take a final test on Friday.
5th - vowel + r sounds
6th - words with ei or ie
Language/Writing - We will work with the Latin roots act, aud this week and the kids will use prefixes, suffixes, and root words to create their own word in poster form.
Each of the students is working on an essay related to his or her "Word of the Year". They will complete these for display during conferences.
5th - Future perfect progressive tense and comparative adjectives.
6th - Possessive nouns
Reading - We will be working with close reading again this week. This process encourages the kids to closely investigate a piece of text, annotate effectively, and then determine the main idea or author's purpose. The 5th graders will work in their Daybooks this week as we continue to focus on these concepts. The 6th graders will begin the novel, The Great Gilly Hopkins on Wednesday.
Math -
5th - We will finish our work with adding and subtracting decimals. We will be moving on to multiplication of decimals and will work with this for the remainder of the week.
6th - We are working with multiplication and division of fractions this week.
Social Studies - The 6th graders will complete work on ancient Sumer and the characteristics of civilizations.
Science - The 6th graders are working on periodic table element research projects in class. They will finish their element tiles by Friday.

Friday is the end of our 1st quarter - I honestly cannot believe that we have completed one fourth of our year together. This group of kids is amazing and I am blessed by each day with them!