Shhh...It's A Secret!

Welcome back from a great holiday and long weekend. Hope that you are staying warm and safe out there as the snow continues to fall outside today. It's beautiful, but chilly, please remind your student to dress appropriately for our winter weather. It's that time again...we filled our classroom bucket with hundreds of wonderful, and kind deeds given by all students inside our class. We have discussed two ways to celebrate. The first is a secret, because it involves all of us being secret Santas to some well deserving individuals in our building. Just ask your student and he/she can fill you in on our secret plan! The second way we are celebrating is having our class participate in a classroom secret Santa activity. Next Friday, we will be randomly assigned a friend. We will get to work our holiday magic, by secretly leaving notes, kind deeds, or goodies behind for our friend to discover everyday beginning the week of Dec. 9-13. We decided that if we wanted to purchase items for our friend, that the total for the whole week should be limited to $3.00. It would be ideal if students could earn their own money for items. They will probably be asking you for odd jobs that they can help with, to earn a little extra change. If this is a problem in any way, please let me know about your concerns and questions. Thanks for your help with this little holiday celebration! We are moving on this week with x2 and x5 multiplication facts. Students brought home flash cards yesterday in their homework folder to be used with games assigned for math homework. We are just beginning to push ourselves to not only understand the meaning behind multiplication and division, but also to become fluent with the facts. We are well on our way to mastering the facts! This week in Reading Street we are reading a drama titled, Pushing Up The Sky. This drama is an example of a myth that has been told to explain why things work in nature. It is a wonderful story told by Northwestern Native Americans to teach why we have a sky, and how the stars were placed there.