What a fun week!  

First of all, swimming lessons are off to a great start.   Your children are little fish in the water and it is a lot of fun to watch them swim! Those lovely swimsuits are definitely not a favorite for most of the students, but they still have a great attitude toward swimming class!  If you want to come watch this week, your child will be swimming from 12:35-1:20 on Monday-Thursday.  There are no swimming lessons on Friday.

Secondly, it SNOWED this week!  I love the enthusiasm the class has over seeing the snow again (definitely much more enthusiasm than me!).   The prayers of the students are prayers of praise for the change in seasons and for the blessing of playing in snow.  What an awesome creator our God is!

Here is what we have been doing in class:

Reading:
This week in reading we have started our new unit on studying characters throughout a book series. This is a very fun unit because they are doing this in book clubs. Ask your child to tell you about it. Our mentor text Sarah, Plain and Tall is such a great book. It is one of my favorites. Each day your student first meets with their group to discuss the previous day's teaching point and then we meet as a whole group and practice a new strategy. One important skill required in book clubs is how we talk to others but more importantly, how we listen and respond. We have actually practiced this using very specific prompts. This is a very important life long skill. This week the students set their reading goals and tracked the main and secondary characters of their story as well as the setting.



Writing:
This week we have practiced writing with sensory details a bit more as this is a very important skill so that our readers can experience our small moments that we are writing about. We also picked our next small moment that we want to publish for our 2nd personal narrative and we made our writing plan by putting the moment bit by bit on post it notes on a story mountain.


HOMEWORK ALERT: Your child has brought their story mountain home this weekend and they need to read it to 2 other people adding more verbal details than what is on their post it note. They also need to have those 2 listeners sing it in their homework folder for Monday. Please make sure that the story mountain comes back on Monday.


ALSO--I do need your help. It is very important that your child meets their book club reading goal every day and if they bring that book home to finish reading that it comes back with their orange reading journal the next day. If it does not come back, they can not participate in their book club because they do not have anything to share because they did not do the work. I appreciate your help on making sure that this happens each night. This reading can count for their normal reading minutes as well--just record it as such. Thank you!

Math:

We worked hard all week in preparation for our Friday Math test.  We reviewed multiplication and division facts, practiced finding area, and drew many pictures to help us with two step story problems.  Our test today went very well.  I told the class that their confidence in Math has grown so much since the beginning of the year!  I also told the students that as long as they did their best, I was extremely proud of them.  They DID do their best and my heart is full of pride.  What a hard working group!  Next week we will start a new unit dealing with measurement, time, and graphs.

Bible:

We wrapped up Psalm 121 this week.   We also began Psalm 100 which is a review for the class from previous years.  We have been studying Abram and how God calls him to leave his home and move to a new land.  We have mapped out Abram's journey to the land of Canaan and we have begun to focus on the promises God makes to Abram.  How incredible to see God's salvation plan unfolding in this story of the Bible!

Social Studies:

We learned this week about Michigan's climate (seasons, precipitation, lake effect, and temperature) as well as vegetation (orchards and forests).  We also focused on human characteristics in Michigan such as bridges, major highways, the Detroit tunnel, and lighthouses.  The class really enjoyed learning about the building of the Mackinac Bridge and we enjoyed a book and video on this topic.  I also showed the students a website that allows them to see photos of Michigan's lighthouses.  Several of the students asked to have this website to explore some more at home.  It is www.terrypepper.com/lights/state_michigan.htm

Have a great weekend!

Lynae and Erin