I hope you all enjoyed the record-breaking snow we received on Sunday and your 3 snow days!  I had so much fun playing in the snow with my kids this week, as it was the most snow they had ever seen!  🙂

*Important Announcements This Week*

*Winter Party:  Thank you to our amazing room parents, Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Martindale, for organizing our class’s winter party that will take place next Wednesday!  If you have not already, please send in $3.00 with your child to help offset the cost of the party.  Please send in cash with your child to school, and I will make sure that it gets to our room parents. Thank you very much for your help with this.  Also, I will be sending home a permission slip with information about the food we will be having for the party.  Please sign and return it letting me know if your child will be allowed to eat these foods.

*Coding Lesson:  Students did a great job with the coding lesson that we did for “Hour of Code” last week. If you are interested in checking out the website that we were using, you can go to Code.org and have your child show you some of the modules that we worked through. It is a great problem solving activity, and the kids think that it is so much fun!

*What Are We Learning In Class?*

*Reading: 

This week and next week we will focus on sensory words.  We will use a picture book at the beginning of the week to analyze the descriptive language that authors use to play on our different senses.  Students will then analyze a shorter writing and use a graphic organizer to locate sensory words that appeal to each of our 5 senses.  Next week, students will have the chance to write their own poem using sensory words.  The class will take a short assessment on sensory words on Tuesday, 12/18.

*Math:

This week we will continue our unit on division.  As we discussed in class last week, it is really important for students to follow the same steps each time and not try to take shortcuts.  They still need to follow along and use their notes to help them when practicing independently. Please encourage your child to use the example problems that we put into the math notebook when they are at home and working on homework. From this point forward, students will need to check each division problem that they do by multiplying. There are notes in your child’s math notebook showing exactly how to check by multiplying.  We will continue both Type A and Type B 2 digit division this week.  The class will take a 2-digit division quiz on Monday 12/17 (it will cover both “Type A” and “Type B” problems).  Then we will move on to do “Type A” 3-digit division. Problems that we consider to be Type A 3-digit would be a problems such as 538 divided by 7 or 185 divided by 5.  In both of these examples, students would need to divide the divisor into the first 2 digits of the dividend because the divisor is greater than the first digit of the dividend.  Please see the examples in your child’s notebook for help.  Thank you for checking in with your child on how they are doing with division this week and next week.

*Social Studies:

Students will take the VS.4 Colonial Virginia test on the next day we have school!  It was originally scheduled for Tuesday of this week, but as I told the class on Friday, they would be taking the next time I saw them if we didn’t have school due to snow. 

*Science:

Before winter break, we will begin our next unit on the Earth, Moon, & Sun.  We will start our unit by learning about the historical contributions of 4 famous astronomers.  Next week we will learn about characteristics of the Earth, moon, and sun and compare the three of them.  Then we will learn about rotation and revolution, while discussing the causes of day and night and why we have different seasons.  Students will take a quiz on the 4 astronomers the week we return from break.  They will also take a vocabulary quiz on the Earth, moon, and sun vocabulary words after we return from winter break. Please encourage your child to be studying these words.

Have a great rest of your week!

-Mrs. Jacobsen