January 12

Our P.O.D. groups reminded us this week how special and loved we are to God.
He has made us to be unique and we are so precious to Him.

Upcoming Dates/Reminders:

• Reading Minutes due Monday
• Spelling test will be given on Friday.  New word sorts sent home next week Monday.
• January 20-End of 2nd Quarter
• January 27- Report cards come out
• February 17- No School for Staff Development
• February 20- No School for Winter Break
• Wacky Wednesday's are back!  January 18-Sport team or sport pride day, January 25- Backward Day, February 1- Crazy hair day, February 8- Pajama Day

Curriculum Highlights:
Devotions:  On Monday your child brought home a letter talking about our class devotions.  Most of the students want a turn to lead devotions so a schedule came home giving each of them a day.  If your child's date does not work for you, let me know and we can make a change.  We are excited to start this next week!

Bible:  We began studying the stories of Joseph this week.  We saw how his brothers were jealous of him and sold him into slavery.  We see how God is with Joseph as he works for Potiphar, is throw in jail, interprets dreams, and eventually comes before Pharaoh.  We talked about how Joseph had to trust God even when long periods of time had past.  We see God's faithfulness to Joseph through our Bible readings and our class discussions have been rich.
Our new Bible memory is Psalm 1.  I will send a copy of this home tomorrow with your child.

Math:  Our new Math unit deals with place value, addition, and subtraction.  We began making place value drawings this week dealing with the ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands.  Our work this week has been very hands-on as we get used to saying these large numbers and understanding the importance of place value in word problems.  We are also continuing to practice our multiplication and division facts to ensure comprehension of these skills.

Literacy:  We have begun our nonfiction unit.  The students enjoyed getting nonfiction books in their book boxes and have learned how to hunt for text features before we read these books.  We learned how to tap into our prior knowledge about a topic before we begin reading as well as how to paraphrase a paragraph.  Paraphrasing is a new concept that we will practice again on Friday before we move on to finding main ideas and details in our reading.  Our writing will be tied directly to this unit after we learn the skills needed to read and comprehend nonfiction text.

Science:  This week we focused on our Changes in Motion unit and worked with the concepts of gravity, variables, friction, force, and Newton's laws.  We had a lot of fun experiments with this!

As always, let me know if you have any questions or concerns!  It is such a privilege for me to teach your child each day.

Blessings,
Lynae