This was a "finishing-up" week! We worked so hard to get things done, and we did it! We finished our writing unit and had a fun tropical celebration. The writing is hanging on our bulletin board and the class is proud of their work. We finished up our narrative reading unit, and the students all made so much progress in the kinds of thoughts they jotted down in their Reader's Notebooks. Finally, we finished up our multiplication and division unit. The final assessment made me happy -- there are still a few tangled ideas about multiplying and dividing, but we have made HUGE progress since September.

Next week, we will begin reading and writing nonfiction units. Your children will all be writing "expert books" so this might be a good weekend to help them come up with some ideas.  We will be reading books about the weather, at least for a few weeks. Then they will get to choose other nonfiction books that are appealing to them.

We will also start our next math unit, Adding and Subtracting with Large Numbers. Although it starts out with some review, this unit teaches them all a lot of flexible strategies for adding and subtracting, really cements their understanding of place value, and teaches them how to add a subtract with what we used to call "borrowing and carrying" (which is really just regrouping.) They always love this unit and have a huge AHA moment when they begin to understand this!

Our new vocabulary words this week were elated and fragrant. Use those around your dinner table!

Ask your kids about:

• Empathy
• Day of the Dead
• Was Funny Once
• Algebra!

That is all for this week -- short and sweet, for a change!  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. It looks like it is going to be abundantly sunny!