Great to be back!!

Happy New Year to each and every one of you. I hope you had an enjoyable break filled with lots of laughter, fun, and memories. I know I sure did. Once again these kids are amazing. They jumped right into learning today like they never skipped a beat. We started off with our morning meeting & Rusty. Rusty kicked off the New Year with a great poem about being "diamonds" and how each of us is a diamond going through pressures & changes. Ask them about it. Also, each of us wrote 2 goals for the new year. Ask your child what theirs is and write New Year in the planner. Then we started our Geography map skill activity for the Southeast region. We will finish it tomorrow. Make sure you are studying the states & capitals for the SE. Once again you should have the map to study at home and we use flash cards here at school. In Lead 21, we finished our Selection 2 and will test out tomorrow on the skills of context clues, generalizations, and visualizations. Speaking of tests, next week is going to be testing week. We will take the SRI reading test on Tuesday and then the Winter MAP tests for reading & math on Wed. and Thurs. So please don't make any appointments on these days if at all possible. Thank you-otherwise they have to be made up which means time out of the classroom. I will be meeting with each student individually on Monday to set up goals for the MAP tests. I will show them their Fall score and then add on to it the number of points that should be gained during this amount of time. It gives them a score to reach for and work hard towards. In Math today, we learned another new algorithm (strategy) for doing long division. It is similar to the old, "royal family" traditional way, but a bit different and seemed to help those students that were having difficulty with the other. So let's hope with lots of practice, it will get easier. We also continued our measurement unit with making our capacity cards. We will do a fun activity tomorrow called Gallon Bot Man. Mrs. Neese had a fun video today called "frienomy". Ask them about it and what they learned. If they can tell you, write "frienomy" in the planner. Not too sure how to spell it. :(((( New reading calendars went home today with some important dates on it also. Return Decembers tomorrow if you haven't already. Also, tomorrow is PE so get those tennis shoes here along with recorders for Music. Have a great night.