Week of January 3rd

Happy New Year! I cannot believe it is already 2012. I trust you had a wonderful and relaxing break. I sure did. My husband and I celebrated our two year anniversary, our niece's first birthday and our first Christmas as a family of 3! We had a blast watching Finley chew on bows and attempt to eat paper. She turned 9 months old and grew 2 inches in the last month! She is going to be very tall...shocking I know! Thank you again for your love and support through my first year as a working mom! I couldn't resist pictures :).



We have accomplished so much this school year already. I am so excited to start the second half of the year with your kids. I am especially excited to get them back into a routine! I want to thank those of you who take the time to read the blog and keep up to date with what we are doing in the class.

This week we are jumping right back into things. The spelling and vocabulary words are on the right side of the blog have been updated. Please remember to practice the spelling and vocabulary words with your kids nightly.

Here is what we are covering this week:

Language Arts:

• characters
  
• adjectives
• digraphs: /n/ kn; /r/ wr; /f/ gh, ph
• suffixes: -ly, -ness
  

Math:

• paper and pencil addition strategies
  
• partial-sum addition algorithm
  

Science

• beginning to wrap up our unit on Matter
  

Writing

• We are continuing to work on Small Moment stories and will begin our revision unit of study in the next couple of weeks. The kids have really been looking forward to this unit and I am pretty excited about it as well!

Social Studies

• Australia

**Please make sure that your child is writing their name on all of their homework as well as writing neatly. The students are still expected to read 20 minutes a night and fill out and send in reading logs when completed.

Have a wonderful week!