Week 13

I hope that you all enjoyed a wonderful Veteran's Day with your family, enjoying the glorious weather we had before this cold snap!  Speaking of cold snap... as we enter into the winter months, it is still my intention to take the children outside for recess.  Of course if the temperatures are dangerously low, we will find something to do indoors, but please feel free to send your child to school with hat/gloves/scarf in his/her backpack!

Reading: This week we will be focusing on a few skills including making inferences about characters based on the text and using text features such as photographs, titles and subheadings to better our understanding of nonfiction.  We will be starting The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this week as a group read, so our vocabulary words are taken from the first chapter of this classic: evacuation, enormous, parcel, unexpected, wardrobe, stooping, splendid, inquisitive, glimpse.

Spelling: No spelling this week

Language: We are continuing our focus on verbs, particularly different tenses of verbs (present, future and past) and subject and verb agreement.

Math: This week we are working on a multiplication menu.  Through this menu, the children are investigating and learning how to multiply by multiples of 10 and multiply 2-digit times 2-digit numbers.  The children should all have their facts memorized by now; on Friday we will be taking a test on all the facts.

Science: This week the children will looking at how to carefully draw and label their vehicle so that someone could later copy it as well as design the basic car that we will be using for the majority of our experiments over the next month.

Alabama History: We finished talking about Alabama's first explorers today and will be moving into the French and Indian War later this week.  Trivia question: Do you know who fought in the French and Indian War?  The answer is not quite as easy as it may seem! :)

Today, with our Character Partners, we made mounds of cards to be sent to our service men and women to say thank you for all that they do for us.  The kids wrote very thoughtful notes that I know will help to brighten someone's day.  Thank you to Denise Williams and the Lindamood Bell organization for getting us involved in this great project!