Merry Monday!

Well.. it officially December.... and we're off!

My goal in the next three weeks if to complete two main units of study. The first unit of study that I wish to complete prior to the holidays are Personal Narratives. We had put our narrative writing aside for a while to work on our Poetry unit. You are going to be amazed at the poems that your children have written. Their poems have made wonderful class books that I know you will enjoy seeing. However, each child does have a copy of their poem in the writing workshop binder for safe keeping.
We will also complete our study of the Native Americans indigenous to Florida. Today we began our lesson on the importance of an outline and how to go about creating one. This is a very mature skill and can be challenging for everyone.  The lesson to follow on Tuesday and Wednesday helps explain how to organize information from a primary source. I have given the children an outline with certain categories and facts missing. They have to determine what information is missing and  complete the outline. We are working on this as a class. You will be able to see this as well when you come to our Author's Celebration on December 18 from 2:15 to 2:50.

Tonight, you will want to look in your child's homework folder. One item that you should find is a mini-adjective booklet. This booklet was used with Chapter 8 in 7*9= Trouble. One cannot expect children to use adjectives, if they are not aware of them in their reading. So they first worked with a reading buddy to read the chapter aloud and out the adjectives in the correct categories. Then we came back together as a group and discussed what they had found or not found. I would encourage the children to continue to be aware that good writing contains descriptive words and they should use them as well in their own writing. As the children read the weekly reading comprehension to you, please stop  them to point out good adjectives.

This week, we will begin our next class novel, A Lion To Guard Us. This is an historical fiction book about three children who travel to Jamestown desperately searching for their father. Although Jamestown is not a part of our curriculum, it is in fourth grade. This book is a good book to use to continue our study of characters and how characters can change within a story.

Our spelling list this week included words that have a au and an aw spelling. The words are as follows:
pause, because, author, laundry, auto, August, dawn, drawn, crawl, shawl, brawl, draw, straw, jaw, awful, awkward, awning, squawk, lawyer, haul.

We will complete our Wordly Wise work this week on Lesson 6 and have a test on Friday.

We are working on multiplication word problems in math. Please make sure that your child is reviewing the multiplication math facts 0, 1, 2, and 3 this week. Tomorrow our lesson will be on multiplication arrays. It really does help if the children are confident with these early multiplication facts.

We completed our Comic Life Computer project last week. The children have become quite the Comic Life experts. This week, their poster will come home with a rubric attached. This rubric is comprehensive in that it focuses on the major objectives of this project in an outline of checklist form.  Each area was completed reviewed and the children were reminded even again prior to printing, to follow the directions of the project. Each child was even given a checklist of these objectives to have at their computer while they were working. This checklist was to ensure that your child knew the expectation of the project and they could be more independent in helping themselves. The score on the rubric will be reflected in their science grade as well as in the work and study habits portion of the report card.

Again, please make sure that you are signing the reading comprehension activity that is due on Fridays. There were several this week that were not signed. That signature indicates to me that you have listened to your child read this passage.

Our Holiday container is beginning to fill up. Please feel free to send in your packages once you have them ready. Also, we are in the midst of the last contest for Box Tops. We have quite a few already in our little box. But we have until the middle of January to get out hot chocolate and cookie treat. If we win, perhaps we can wear our bedroom slippers that day for fun!!!