First Whole Week!

We've made it through the first whole week! Yay! I hope your students are having as good a time in my class as I am having teaching them. It's been a fantastic week really getting to know the kids. All of our preassessments are out of the way. I'm really hoping that I can make it through the Words Their Way tests this weekend so I can hand out the leveled spelling lists next week. I didn't even test the spelling list this week because it wasn't a part of our program. The main concept behind this week's list was getting the kids used to the different sorts.

Thanks to everyone for getting all of our locker forms in this week! Our class has our lockers. The kids have been enjoying getting used to the combinations and how to open them. We are going to be focusing this next week on making sure we have everything out of our lockers before we need it. I have posted in the hallway a whiteboard that will tell the kids what they are going to need for the morning and again what they are going to need for the afternoon. So long as the students look at this list and abide by it, it will eliminate all the senseless trips to the lockers during class time.

On that same note, I sent home our Computer Usage Agreements on today (Friday, August 28). These need to be signed and returned before the students will be allowed to use the computers. Our first trip to the computer lab is this Tuesday. The ultimate goal is to have these all signed and returned on Monday, but Tuesday at the latest so the kids will be allowed to participate with our Computer Specialist this week.

We have a lot of fun things planned for the coming week. We will be moving on to the next story in our Basal reader, which is "Yang the Eldest and His Odd Jobs". On Monday we will be filling in our Words We Love Chart, which we will change once a month. We will be looking at prefixes, suffixes and root words and complete and simple subjects. As I said prior, hopefully I will have the leveled spelling lists ready by Monday this week. That is my goal at least.

We will keep pushing forward in our first chapter of Math. It is still a lot of review and solidification of things we should have learned last year. (You should ask your student to sing you our order of operations song. It was fun!) This week we will be looking at the distributive property and expanded and scientific notation and then we will jumping into algebraic equations.

We began our Drama art elective this week and we will continue with it for the rest of this term before rotating to our next elective. For the first few weeks we will just be doing small in class drama activities. It will only be either next week (Aug. 31) or the week after that we will begin looking at the script for this terms production.

Finally, in science this week we will begin looking at microorganisms. This is our focus for the rest of this term. More specifically this week, we will be looking at what the six characteristics of living things are and how we can apply them to the real world.

I'm looking forward to another fantastic week this week and I hope everyone else is too!!!