Newsletter

Hi,

Wow! We started working on our projects for our Native American research. Your children worked together and solved disagreements together and decided on interesting projects then got to work. I was impressed with their creativity and how engaged they were in their work. Some of the groups are making power points, some making dioramas, and some are creating plays and songs. We are going to try to finish them by next Friday. I will take photos to share and video of the plays. I can't wait to see these projects!

Pen Pals are coming next Friday!
We are very excited to meet our pen pals and will be planning our activities this week. Our pen pals are residents at The Court in Round Rock Assisted Living Facility and we will be interviewing them about their childhoods, learning from each other, and playing games. They will be arriving at about 9:30 am in the library and will be staying for about an hour. Feel free to come and enjoy our pen pals with us!

Conferences
Just about all of us have a conference time set up next week. This conference is a goal setting conference so your child should be present. We will be sharing some work that your child has completed so far and talk about areas for improvement and goals for this year. I look forward to meeting with you all!

Reading
This week in reading we read The Story of Ruby Bridges together and worked on asking questions to gain information. We applied this to Native Americans in Texas research that we are doing. Everyone also has a novel that they are reading in school as well. We have begun meeting in book club groups to share our questions, inferences, thoughts, and feelings about our book. Before each meeting, we read and write responses in our book club section of our reader's response books. Then we share our thinking in our meetings. It is wonderful to hear such excitement and enjoyment over sharing our thoughts about our books. Next week we will be looking at poetry.

Writing
In writing we are working hard to finish writing a second story in our draftbooks. Then the children examine both of their personal narratives and decide which one they want to publish at this time. Then we rewrite the draft and begin more revising. We add some show, not tell. (Use lots of descriptions and details to make the reader feel that they are there with the writer, instead of just telling the reader.) We are still planning to have our Author's Celebration on Wednesday, October 12. Some of us may not have our completely done and pretty final copy ready but will have a great personal narrative to share with you. We hope that you can come!

Math
We are continuing to work on strategies for multiplication. We practiced the double, double strategy in computation and in problem solving situations. We played games using multiples of 10 in multiplication and sang Three is a Magic Number with the Schoolhouse Rock video. We share lots of strategies for our problem solving using the document camera so your child is experiencing many different strategies to use when solving problems and hopefully finding some that work best for him/her. Continue to talk about math situations at home. Use time, money, fact practice, skip counting etc... in games and in the car to practice. Next week we will do some patterns and algebraic reasoning.

Science
Changes from Heat was our topic. We experimented with evaporation by painting with water on the blacktop. We learned about melting by melting some crayon pieces in the sun. (Thank you Madi for sharing your melted crayon experiment that you did at home! Very cool!) We also experimented with freezing by putting a water balloon in the freezer and seeing what would happen. We studied using games, songs, and websites on Stemscopes and did well on our assessment. Next we will be learning about mixtures and solutions.

Social Studies
The children are in cooperative groups and each group is researching a Texas Tribe. We thought about questions that we wanted to answer in our research and are looking in books and on two websites to find information. We are writing down our sources to use in a bibliography and are going to present our information in a creative way. Each child will also write a Native American essay to practice our expository writing.

Dates to remember:
Monday, October 10=No school for students, Parent/Child/Teacher Conferences
Tuesday, October 11=Service Club Meeting
Wednesday, October 12=Individual Picture Day at 10:40
Author's Celebration at 2:00pm in our classroom
Thursday, October 13-Conferences
Friday, October 14=Pen Pal Visit at 9:30 am in FCE library

Have a wonderful weekend! Don't miss the Chalk Walk on Main Street in Round Rock on Saturday!

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you for sharing your child with me.

Sincerely,
Pam Bartholomew