Hello Parents! I hope you are having a great week! Just a reminder that tomorrow (Friday) is Spirit Day! For $1 the students may wear sweatpants and their favorite "team" shirt! Since it is homecoming, they can wear their Panther gear! Don't forget it is a two hour early out on Friday too!!!

Mrs. Mitchell has been joining us in our reading and math time for small group work. She is with us for about 20 minutes for each class, three times a week. I mix the groups up every week. One group will do an activity with her and the other group works with me. It could be a vocabulary , comprehension, or decoding activity. In math, we are both just continuing what we are doing in class with a small group activity.  Again, I switch the groups up every week.

Reading- This week we read a story called Double Dutch. It is a story about how a girls jump rope team was formed by a teacher at their school. The skill this week was about sequencing of the events. We did spend a lesson putting some of the events in order. They were also working on finding the nouns in sentences and labeling them common or proper. We need to do some more work on them. I think the hardest part for anyone is to realize that a word can be more than one part of speech, depending on how it is used in the sentence. Their test scores from last week are in the take home folders. This test had an extra story for them to read and answer ten questions on. This test was worth 50 points. Overall, they did really well. There are still areas they need to work on. They really should spend time studying their vocabulary words, and they need to use the context clues in the sentence to help them choose their answer. The grammar piece was hit a little hard because they were getting their subject and predicates mixed up. 

We have one story left in this unit, which means they will have a unit test in two weeks.

Math-- This week they worked more on multiplying double digits or triple digits by double digits. They also worked on estimating their products. This was really good because as they worked I heard them making comments about how their "real" answer wasn't close to their "estimation". It made them stop and check over their work, which is always a good thing. On Wednesday, we started using the Distributive Property of Multiplication to solve division problems. This is a multiplication chapter...don't worry, they won't work on division problems until the next chapter.  In our small group on Tuesday, I had them in two teams and they played tic-tac-toe on the chalkboard, but they were solving multiplication problems that Mrs. Mitchell and I made up.  They loved it!  They also realized that working fast wasn't always the best method. We played it again on Wednesday! 

Religion- We are wrapping up another chapter this week. They will be testing on Monday or Tuesday next week. They did a TERRIFIC job with their first mass! I was very proud of them! We also took some time out to watch Pope Francis' visit to the USA. I am hoping we can watch a little more on Friday, but time will be the question. It's hard to believe October is around the corner. That is the month of the Rosary. We will be saying that in class. They don't have to bring a rosary to school, unless they want to. I have plenty of them to hand out. For the 5th graders this will also mean they will be memorizing two of the prayers we say during the Rosary. They will also be memorizing all of the decades. We will work spend time in class working on this. 

Have a great weekend! Enjoy the parade on Friday and all the other homecoming activities!
God Bless, Miss Surma