Update Feb 7

Our first full week of school in almost a month and the students were tired by Friday!
Next week is a short week due to Student Conferences. It has been a busy month and a half with report writing, admissions events, and multiple visitors both on weekends and during the week. The students and I are ready for our classroom to return to our normal schedule after conferences end. After I finish writing this, I will enjoy my first day off in a month! Yeah and the sun is shinning!

Reading:
We have our OBOB competitions this week. In class is Monday and the 4/5 competitions will be Tuesday. Overall, I am focusing on the benefits we have had in the classroom and less on winning the OES team seat. As a class, students has practiced reading and rereading books for better understanding. They have been attending to explicit information for the competition as well as theme and inferential information for classroom conversations. They are trying out new books and discovering new authors and series of books to enjoy. The class has in-depth conversations about books and character's motivations. It has been wonderful! Now, to encourage this behavior past the competition!

Writing:
We are trying to finish our literary essays and I think it will be a couple more weeks. The class is gaining understanding and independence when completing an essay format. We are now focusing attention on paragraph structure. We are building topic sentences and building powerful statements with direct evidence from their texts. As always, we continue to hammer home about CAPITALS and PERIODS!

Math:
We are starting a project with Mr. Arensberg where we will be using our multiplication skills to determine volume and surface area. This will be an in-depth project using manipulatives, team work and problem solving. Mr. Arensberg will share a more in-depth description shortly.

Coming Soon:
Information about the International Fair timeline and assignments.