Week 10

We've had a busy week! Music classes started today with our instructor Tor Snyder. We will learn to play the keyboard this year. Luckily, we had Mrs. Carmody and Mrs. Au helping us with our keyboarding skills! Out thanks to these helpful ladies!

Ms. Annette Tacconelli, visited us today to help us make wampum. We are extremely lucky to have such an expert artist volunteer to work with us! It required a great deal of patience but many of our kids persevered and quite a few have almost completed their wampum beading. Everyone took theirs home to continue making. We are most grateful to Ms. Annette for teaching us this fun activity!

Please check out the Class Playlist for our very first student video!!! Tali and Graydon did a great job quickly explaining how to write an introduction paragraph for an essay. Keep an eye out for further videos by other members of the class.

Here's what's coming up this week:

• Schools are closed on Monday for Veteran's Day.
• Report cards will distributed on Tuesday.
• Parent Teacher Conferences will take place on Wednesday. Children will be dismissed at 12 noon. 
• The class will visit the School Book Fair on Thursday at 11:15 am. The fair will be open starting Tuesday and families can visit anytime to purchase books.
• We are starting a new reading unit, Nonfiction. This unit will focus on the two types of non fiction, Narratives (biographies, historical accounts) and Expository (All About Books). We will learn to read nonfiction using text features in order to determine important information, and use multiple sources to build our expertise on a subject. As a challenge, we will read nonfiction with a critical eye, determing the author's point of view and noticing any bias in the information presented.
• We are also starting a new writing unit, Realistic Fiction. We will  revisit skills we used for our personal narrative unit and add on new strategies, so that we can contruct a short story based on a European Story structure (Exposition, character, problem, rising action, climax and resolution).
• In Math, we have started our work with Multiplication concepts and strategies. Please feel free to review multiplication facts up to the 12 times table with your child. There are several fun math games on our blog links that can help with that.

Finally, we should acknowledge the great volunteer work and contributions of  members of our community. Many people have stepped up to donate time, money and supplies to help those most affected by Hurricane Sandy. To witness the generosity and care is a great lesson to our children!
Please continue to contribute to our Penny Harvest.
Have a safe and happy weekend!