It has been such a fast week! I have really enjoyed meeting with all of you, and I feel like I know your children better now!  This week has flown by. With Monday's holiday and me being out on Wednesday, it feels like it has been a pretend week!  

We HAVE managed to get a lot of work done, however. Our math work is coming along, and this week we learned how to use the US algorithm for subtraction to subtract across a middle zero. We are also using much bigger numbers now, and working with thousands can be confusing. I am really pleased to see the students using a variety of strategies as they solve increasingly difficult subtraction problems! Next week we will begin making a "10,000" chart and discussing how to manage adding and subtracting huge numbers!

We had our writing celebration today. I am including this link to a padlet where you can see everyone's books (I hope this works -- sometimes technology is still a mystery to me!) I love these books! They all worked really hard and it shows. Of course, this is just a snapshot in time -- some of them are unfinished, but like all writers, we had a deadline. We will take next week to learn about figurative language and try our hand at a few other fun writing activities. Then we will move on to opinion writing, another one of my favorites.

Along with opinion writing, our reading focus will return to fiction as we begin to tackle "social issues book clubs." This is always a difficult unit to feel happy about because the list of social issues the children come up with makes me sad. On the other hand, reading about them and seeing the resilience of the characters makes us all feel hopeful, and gives us many strong opinions to write about! I am currently trying to find multi-copy books at all of our reading levels so we can create some sort of book groups. I still haven't figured out how they will share their ideas with each other safely, but I will keep you posted. Be sure to ask your children to tell you about our read-aloud, Front Desk. It is intense, but oh-so-good!

We have taken the week off from our class economy so that our subtraction skills could have a chance to catch up. I think we are ready for more next week! I am going to start the week of by giving everyone their paycheck, along with a stimulus check.... (it's not real money, so why now?) This will give us another entry point to talk about our government and what it does for us, which is the topic of next week's lessons anyway. I love it when the academics from different areas all intersect!

I have been neglecting our class vocabulary for a few weeks, but the students have been asking me, so they miss it! We will be back to learning 4 new words a week starting on Monday. Stay tuned!

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.