Students are still working hard for me.  I wanted to take the time to catch you up on what we have been doing. We have completed our A Reading and A Math testing for the fall.  I was very pleased with scores and hopefully we will see them continue to grow each time they take the test.  Students should have given you a card last night from Hillcrest.  It is an invitation to come and watch some of their events and a free ticket to attend some of the events.  Spelling words are at the bottom.  There are a few tricky spelling words.  I did have two students have a perfect pretest, so they will not have to take the final test. 

   In math, we finished a unit on place value.  Students did take a checkpoint and that has been sent home to you.  We have started to review multiplication then we will move on to division. We struggled a little bit with yesterday's homework over 3 digit times 1 digit multiplication.  Most of the errors were on the story problems and not reading carefully. We went over a few problems today, and students corrected their mistakes. 

   In reading, we are still working on the story elements of a story.  We worked hard on setting. We worked on what setting is, how it can change within a story, and compared settings from one story to another story.  We are now working on character traits.  We have a list of character traits to use.  We use the character traits to describe the main characters of the stories that we listen to at the beginning of class.  By the end of the week, we will be comparing two characters from different stories. 

   We have switched from science for a little while and are working on some basic map skills and knowledge. We are also talking about the culture of each continent.  Our next unit in social studies will be over World War II.

    In spelling, language and writing, we are still working on sentence structure, but we have also started working on paragraph structure. We are comparing a paragraph to a hamburger.  You need a topic sentence (top of bun), supporting details (everything in the middle), and the closing sentence (bottom of the bun).  We are currently working on making sure we have a good topic sentence.  

Spelling words

1. awake

2. feast

3. stray

4. greet

5. praise

6. disease

7. repeat

8. display

9. braces

10. thief

11. ashamed

12. sleeve

13. waist

14. beneath

15. sheepish

16.  release

17.  remain

18.  sway

19.  training

20.  niece.