Hello Parents, I hope you are having a good week! 

Halloween- We will do our regular Halloween activities on Halloween.The students should bring their costume to school that day.  The parade of costumes will be at 2:30 in the gym. You are more than welcome to join us! If you are going to take your child home afterwards, please let me know before you leave. Thanks! 

Math- This week we worked some more on division with single digits, but then we moved into a new strategy. It is called Partial Quotients. I know Mrs. Sickels taught partial products last year when they were doing multiplication. I did warn your kids that this strategy would most likely be new to you! They are still dividing, multiplying, and subtracting. This works with double digit divisors pretty easily.  It eliminates a lot of the guess work because they are using 10s. I will make sure to put an example in your child's folder, so you can see what I mean. This doesn't mean we won't go back to the old strategy to divide with double digits. This is just another way of doing it, and for some kids it may be easier. It really gets rid of try, check, and revise your work. I learned this strategy a few years ago when Mrs. Meisenheimer and I took all those math classes over 3 years. I find this one a lot of fun. It really does test them on their subtraction skills. 

Reading-- You will find their scores aren't as great as the week before. This was mainly due to the testing on Adages and Proverbs and Indirect Objects. We will be doing more of that work throughout the year. In my opinion, the test should give them some context to try and figure out what the meaning is of that proverb or adage.  This week's story is about trying to restore the Everglades in Florida. It is a nonfiction piece with some domain specific vocabulary. The spelling test was fun to give on Monday because it was over homophones. They really had to listen to the context of the sentence. They were hoping for easy words like whole and hole or dear and deer. :)

Religion- This week they are playing a matching game of the all 20 decades of the rosary. They have to match them to the correct mystery. Today they are taking a quiz on the Sorrowful Mystery.

In your folder you will find a letter about Mobymax.com.  This is something they work on in technology time, as well as Type to Learn. Mobymax can be done from home too. It is games and activities in math and language arts. 

We have had a few share their Halloween stories. I will be hanging them in the hallway. If you are here and want to read some, please do!

Book Reports- This is just a reminder that book report projects are due November 7. They have about 2 more weeks to complete the book and their project.

Our continued prayers go out to Kirk Levine who is having a difficult battle with cancer.

I hope you have a great weekend! I am actually staying in town! God Bless, Miss Surma