Hi Everyone,
I hope you all had a wonderful and restful Thanksgiving spent with people you love. It was lovely to have a break, but it is also good to be back and into our routine again. I must say I have been really pleased with how smooth our transition has been -- these students are rocking it!

Here's what's happening in our classroom:
Science
We have started our next science unit, a very short unit about stored (or potential) energy. This week we looked at wind-up toys and tried to figure out how they work and where the energy comes from and where it is stored. Then we made our own rubber band racers and tried to "race" them to figure out how many winds it would take to make them stop in the "sweet spot!" Ask your kids to tell you about this!  Next week we will work with marbles and "roller coasters" to talk about energy transference.

Math
We are at the end of our first multiplication and division unit. I am really happy with the work I see students doing with multiplication. Most are using multiples of ten to solve larger problems, and this is exactly what I want to see at this point in the year. Some still don't know their math facts... I am sending home a Moby Max report with the report cards on Monday. This will show you how often your child is doing Moby Max. My expectation is that they do it twice a week for 5 minutes. We do this in the morning before school starts. Some kids get here late and don't have time. Others are here but manage to find other things to do! 

Division is definitely trickier for the entire group. It is hard for them to visualize what is happening in a division problem, even with a story context. And on top of that, remainders make things even harder! We will continue to practice division and multiplication during Math Menu and for homework even though we are moving into our next math unit which is Geometry.

Reading and Writing
We are busy reading non-fiction texts and learning how to determine the main idea and supporting details, It is hard for young readers to distinguish between the topic and the main idea!  We are learning a variety of strategies to help with this, such as looking at the details first and deciding how they all go together or looking at the topic sentence. We are also trying our best to understand the structure of the text and take notes using the same structure. This is a tall order, but it's getting easier!

At the same time, we are also continuing to write our expert books. We are organizing them into chapters, trying to use topic sentences, and adding in interesting vignettes to bring our writing to live.  These units should both be finished by the holiday break.

I think that's everything for now. Thank you to all of you have sent in recipes for our cookbook. These cookbooks will be available to purchase in 2 weeks. I'll keep you posted!

Enjoy your weekend!