Room 20 Classroom Notes October 14-18

Good Week! We had an awesome time creating our class song, "Why." Aaron Meyer and Tim (musicians we worked with) said it was one of the best songs they have ever worked on! Wow! It sure is a powerful song! Our field study down to Johnson Creek has changed to the week of October 29th. We do not need lunches. We will eat at school. Our purpose there is to conduct a field study of the water, plants, and living insects in the stream to measure how healthy our creek is. Please remember to dress appropriately, including warm socks. Make sure to dress in layers, including a weatherproof jacket. If you do not have a jacket at home, we have some at school- let me know ASAP if you need one. I will send a specific time soon- Noah, our friend with Johnson Creek Watershed Council, has had a shake up with his schedule. I will start accepting homework club students after school from 3:00-3:45 every Wednesday starting October 23rd. Students need parent permission to be a part of homework club. This is a good time to have a concentrated time to do homework or get a bit of help from yours truly. This week, we start gardening with Kathleen. We also continue our work with Michael on our play. Please pencil in our performance date October 30th!!! Students must arrive by 6:00pm! Come support your class!!! For writing, we are working on personal narratives and will begin developing a personal narrative for a work sample I will be showing parents at conferences. This week we will include using graphic organizers and including dialogue in our writing. In math, we continue with large multiplication number sense and introducing the algorithm for short cutting big multiplication. In reading, we read a short story about the baseball player Satchel Paige on Monday and Tuesday and continue with "Island of the Blue Dolphins," Wednesday-Friday. We also started a humorous and quirky read aloud called, "Fortunately, the Milk," by Neil Gaiman. In Social Studies, we are working on our Create-A-State maps and in Science we will continue on our planet research projects. This week we also have Run for the Arts! In our new read aloud, one of the characters has a time machine. For homework, I would like students to write an essay about if they had a time machine, where would they go and why? What would you do once you were there? How would you get back? Also, we will have Home Connections 13-16 and spelling words based on "Satchel Paige." I also posted a Spelling City link for the spelling words on my blog. You do not need to login. Please use the free activities.