Thursday and Friday Sept 4-5

The end of the week has arrived. I can hardly believe that this is the end of week 4! We will be starting a new unit at the end of next week. ***Can you guess what we will study next? ***

Morning Quick Read: We finished reading about the Cherry Blossom festival on Thursday. Today we read about the Midsummer Magic Festival in Norway. The reading assessments will be in the students homework folders tonight and the grades are online.

Writing: Yesterday we spent almost an hour editing our stories on our favorite meals. We found out that favorite is a hard word to spell. Today students had to rewrite their stories with all the words spelled correctly. Every sentence needed a capital at the beginning and an end mark. The writing was graded twice, once for content and once for editing errors. Those grades are online but I will be keeping the stories for the students writing portfolios. ***Students - Tell you parents what you wrote about!***

Reading: We continued reading The Mighty Saguaro yesterday and today. Students learned all about the cactus and where it lives and how it survives.
www.raz-kids.com - site for reading online - log in is tracy3rd

Spelling: New words came home on Thursday. The test will be on Wednesday Sept. 10th.
www.spellingcity.com - type your spelling words into this site and play games with them!

Math: Yesterday we took out Math MAP test in the computer lab. The students all did very well. For homework last night students brought home a review for chapter 1 of math. Today that very same review was given to the students as a test. They also were given a self reflection to complete AND... they were asked to try and complete a written response question. This question was a challenge but CONGRATS!!!! to Faith for solving the problem. Great job Faith!

Here is the problem in case anyone wants to try it at home:
Imad collects quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. This morning, he took $1.80 from his collection. He counted the coins and found that he had twice as many nickels as dimes. What coins could Imad have?

Science: The Circle of Life! We have been learning about the life cycle of two plants, one the cactus and two the bean. Today we looked more in depth into the bean plants life. The students started making a book about the beans life. ***Students - Can you tell about the cycle of the bean plant from when it starts as a seed until its seeds falls out of the fruit and it starts over. There are 7 steps. *** Also - can you name the 3 parts of the seed?***

http://www.amphi.com/~ctracy/progressreports/index.html - Check your grades online!

This year is off to such a great start. I am really enjoying having this group of students. They are hard workers and a lot of fun.

In your child's homework folders is a note with the day and time of teacher conferences. Conferences are the week of September 22. September 23-26 are 1/2 days which means all of those days will be like Tuesdays schedule.

Have a wonderful weekend and please drop me an email if you have any questions. Also, if you get a chance please leave a comment on the blog about how I could improve this blog or if you find it useful. Thanks!