100 minutes!

Just a reminder that your child is expected to be reading at least 100 minutes at home each week as part of our weekly homework. The Race to 100 card should be returned on Friday morning. Our class has read 42,550 minutes thus far, but we have several students whose totals are well below 1000 minutes (expectation is at least 2400 by this time in the year).

The play last night was wonderful. The students did an excellent job and parent turn out was amazing. I thought those with speaking parts sounded much older and singing voices were robust! Way to go dinosaur dancers!

We wrote in our interactive journals this morning and finished up the gathering of our facts for our biographies. The students are now expected to have completed their fact gathering and be ready to turn facts into sentences on Monday (we were a little delayed this morning). We played three more rounds of syllable Lotto discussed that each syllable has a vowel sound. It's a hard notion, though, because the bossy e is a vowel but it is not spoken.

Students had a free writing day today and were thrilled. I can't believe how many partner teams are authoring texts. I was amazed at the level of productive conversation. When it gets loud, I'm always tempted to "shhhhh," but after listening in on conversations this morning I determined the students were on-task!

I graded the spelling tests this afternoon. We have several students who were very close to being in the Hall of Fame. One or two letters away! This week's hall of fame students are: Zach, Asher and Teresa.

We continued our conversation about data organization and representation. We began to talk about data sets that involve two attributes and what to do with data points that have BOTH attributes.

Our germ unit started today for health. Did you know that your nose, ears and even lungs have small hairs that act as filters to keep the germs out? We talked at great length about the two most important things we can do to keep ourselves healthy: keep our hands out of our mouths and noses and wash our hands with soap.

Enjoy your weekend. I know lots of you are busy with sports so I hope you have some time for relaxation.