Happy Thanksgiving!

         Greetings and Happy Thanksgiving!  Of course it is now the day after the big T-Day, but the memory lives on, right?  So here we are smack dab in the middle of the holiday season.  Amazing to me to have already seen Christmas decorations even two weeks ago in some places.  Doesn't everyone know we have school to do?  Speaking of which,  hope your break is going well.  Here are a few things we have been doing in class. 
         We have completed our Lit Circles about finding conflict (like that is very hard anymore), the students did a fantastic job on their brief presentations, and we will be starting a new Lit Circle this week.  We are going to focus on non-fiction information and ideas.  More to come on that this week coming up. 
         We have been working on spelling two times a week using the Spellography series as our guide.  Students will be working with word patterns and reviewing many different spellings of the many sounds we use in our language over the course of this year.  While we will not have weekly spelling tests, there will be written check-ins along the way for the different spelling patterns.  We have been writing about Our Special Place in Writing class, and the students have been doing very well regarding this topic.  I have also set up Google Accounts specific to our school for their writing to be filed.  They will be able to access this from any computer in the school with their username and password. 
          The Fourth Grade Mathematicians has been working on multiplication and division using multiple towers.  We are working with multiples of tens to increase our efficiency of multiplying and dividing.  I hope to move this unit along as some of the concepts are similar to our first unit this year and build on these.   One thing that is very important is for your child to continue to work on their multiplication combinations fluency.  This remains very important!  Also, please check in with Karen for information on the 5th Grade Mathematicians. 

          Social Studies class continues to include Thai culture and activities, mapping and civilization studies, and soon we will be doing a unit on an indigenous people, the Taino.

   Our studies in Science will begin to wrap up the Biomes and Ecosystems unit.  Students have been busy exploring the differences between the different biomes that we are covering, working in cooperative groups and preparing posters and information charts with their assigned biomes. We also had our Four Winds program last week.  Some fun times with cones and the Fibbonacci principle.  Check out some of the pictures!

          So, that probably is a good overview of our work over the last two weeks or so. As always, it is a pleasure to work with your children and I enjoyed the conference times we have had.  Still a fe more to get in there as well.  

Thanks from us,  Mr. B and Ms Deb.