Eventful Week!

Dear Families,

This past week has been quite an eventful one to say the least.  The week started off with an extremely successful and fun-filled Harvest Party.  We enjoyed activities such as bowling with gourds, painting creative characters on gourds, and crafting together Tootsie Pop vampires and Fall inspired rings and frames.  All this was done while enjoying delicious cupcakes and the festive costumes that were present.  I would like to thank those parents that devoted their time to plan and implement such a wonderful afternoon.   The most exciting event of the week however, occurred on Wednesday.  After spending Monday and Tuesday resting at home, or at least attempting to rest, Mrs. Jenkins gave birth Wednesday morning to a healthy 7 lb., 20 in. long beautiful baby girl named Lucy.  Mrs. Jenkins and baby Lucy are both doing very well.  I told Mrs. Jenkins that she must send pictures as soon as possible.  We are all so excited for the Jenkins family!

The arrival of Lucy means that my official first day as your children’s teacher was Wednesday!  I am so excited to be in this role now and look forward to spending the rest of the school year with you and your children. 

In addition to these exciting celebrations, our class did a lot of hard work and incredible learning this week.  We are continuing to learn more each day about the Iroquois people.  This past week we created our own Iroquois characters and our clans’ longhouses.  We are eager to get these things up onto our frieze scenery!  New robust vocabulary words were introduced and we did quite a bit of work with these words.  (Robust vocabulary words are the week’s challenge spelling words.)  We determined the definitions of each word together, read them within several stories and texts and wrote our own sentences and synonyms and antonyms for these new challenging words.  The favorite words seemed to be whined, obey and suspicious.  J

In writing, our focus this past week was organization and the importance of including all details and writing those details in a sequential order.  We started to talk a lot about “How-to Writings”.  Examples of how-to writing are cookbooks, instruction manuals and game directions.  How-to paragraphs include the materials needed, details that explain how to do a specific activity, in order and they use words that show sequence, such as, first, next, then and last.  We each are working on our own how-to writing in class.  The students will also be writing a how-to paragraph for their weekly writing homework that is due next Wednesday, November 9^th.

We ended the week with yet another celebration.  Friday was Lily’s birthday!  We want to thank her for the scrumptious cupcakes and hope she had a very happy birthday!

Again, I am so excited to be back in the classroom full-time and am grateful to have such a wonderful group of students to share another great year with.

P.S. There is now school Thursday or Friday next week.  Due to a shortened week, weekly writing is due Wednesday and there will be NO spelling this week.  Math homework will be sent home on Monday and due Wednesday still.