Monday, September 30

Hello! In Science, we continued to work on our Weathering, Erosion and Deposition Inquiry project. The kiddos are making great connections between what they are doing in class and what happens to Earth's surface. Woohoo! In Math, we read a book about strategies to help us multiply our numbers, The Best of Times by Greg Tang. It is not good to simply memorize basic facts. If we understand the strategies, we can solve any problems with those numbers. For example, 8's. 8 x 4 = 32. Double 4 (8), double 8 (16), double 16 (32). So, 8 x 15 = 120 because: Double 15 (30), double 30 (60), double 60 (120). We also practiced the area method for solving multi-digit multiplication problems. Can your kiddo show you this method? After recess, we read more from Nightmare at the Book Fair. This time we read from the Adventure genre. Students shared that there was danger and action in this chapter. In Reader's Workshop, we practiced/reviewed parts of speech by completing Mad Libs. Fun! We also focused on characteristics of the characters in our independent reads. This is a way to show close reading~paying attention to details. In Writer's Workshop, we took that thought about characters from reading and applied it to writing narratives-fictional and personal. We rolled our story dice to get characters, setting and plot, and wrote about A police officer, on an island that helps a friend. We will work with the basics of writing narratives more this week and I'm sure will come up with some great stories! We finished the day with a pre-test but did not have time to write our words in our planners so check tomorrow for them.

**Have your child greet me with, "Here's looking at you kid," tomorrow to receive a warm fuzzy!