Happy New Year!  Here is a brief description of what we are going to be working on in the beginning of the New Year.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the PTA's Box Top competition.  Please don't forget to bring in those box tops and labels for education!  I know it takes a bit of time, but it really does help our school out a lot!

Today we began our unit on fiction in reading.  Over the next few days we are going to be working on identifying character traits and physical characteristics.  We are also going to be using the character traits we identify in order to make predictions about character actions.  We will also be looking at how characters change over time.  Then we will be fine tuning our skills at finding main events.  We will also be looking at settings.  We are going to spend a nice long chunk of time talking about main ideas and finding the moral of stories. 

We also began our new read aloud Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat by Lynne Jonell.  I know kids get excited about this book and want to start reading it at home, but I would really appreciate it if they didn't.  Reading our read aloud ahead takes away from our enjoyment and learning opportunity.  We have a separate read aloud for reading group time.  It is The BFG by Roald Dahl.  We will be using these read aloud books to support our work on fiction texts.

We are working on multiplication now.  We are going to be using numberlines, array models, and area models to represent multiplication facts for 6's, 7's, 8's, and 9's.  In addition to multiplication we are going to be learning about bar graphs, pictographs, and line plots.  We are also going to be looking into area, perimeter, and 3 dimensional shapes. 

We will also continue to look into the culture of Early Northwest Coastal People, learning about how to stay healthy be reading The Great Body Shop, practicing non-fiction texts and learning about current events with Time for Kids, and learning about the Science of Sound.

I know it sounds like a lot of information to cover over the next few weeks, but we can do it!  Remember that every day of school counts, and we have so much to cover that missing days leaves students feeling behind and confused.  Stay healthy!

I look forward to starting off my new year with you guys!