October 2020

 Welcome to October. I love teaching this time of year. This is where we dive into our plant unit, learn about Ancient Egypt, mummify an apple, and so much more! As always, I will let you know what we are doing and when right here in the blog. Here is what we have coming up this week....

Math:  We will continue on where we left off last week, learning how to make equivalent expressions, learning the commutative property of addition, and using the commutative property to count on from the larger addend. Once we get past Monday's lesson of turning a false number sentence into a true number sentence, the rest of the week should go rather smoothly in math. 

ELA:   Our ELA runs in 4 week units, alternating between social studies and science. We began our year with our social studies unit on families. We are now entering week 2 of our Plant unit. This means (now that we have distributed materials) we can begin incorporating our reading with our science, and do some planting by the end of the week! The spelling sound of the week is ck and ng.

Science:  As mentioned above we will begin planting our seeds at the end of this week. This, along with learning about how seeds travel last week, will kick off our plant unit. Before we plant we will talk about what is a scientist and begin recording about being a scientist in our science notebooks. Warning - we will be using our scissors and glue sticks this week, please make sure your child has these materials that were sent home at the beginning of the year.

Material Distribution: If you were unable to make it on Friday to pick up your child's materials please make sure you do so as soon as possible this week, Monday would be ideal. Your child's bag of October supplies are in the office. Please make sure you pick up the bag with your child's name on the science notebook. Also, there is dirt and seeds in the science bags. You may want to make sure that these are placed somewhere safe until the day we plant (I'm aiming for Thursday but depending on what happens this week it may happen Friday). On a personal note, thank you to all of those who had just the kindest things to say on Friday. Your words of encouragement and acknowledgement were uplifting and did my teacher heart good. I even received a couple of little handmade gifts which was totally unexpected and so thoughtful. I also just loved seeing the kids. Each time I feel like we know each other better and it is so cool to see their cute little faces in person and spend a minute talking to each other. I just wish I could hug them all!

Pink Out:  On Friday all Marshall students and staff will be wearing pink to support and raise awareness of breast cancer. In honor of a very amazing and sweet friend of mine who passed on Thursday from breast cancer I would love my class all to be wearing pink on Friday. 

Parent/Teacher Conferences:  Conferences will be held Monday, October 12th - Wednesday, October 14th. These will be early release days (12:25 on Monday and Tuesday, 11:10 on Wednesday). I will send out an online sign-up about midweek so keep an eye out. Also, conferences will be 20 minutes, and they will be held online as well. I will not be holding any in person conferences at all. You will be able to access your meeting time via our regular classroom Zoom link. I will resend that out to you as the time draws closer. Thursday, Friday, and the following Monday will all be days off for a fall holiday. Yep, 5 days off. Enjoy. 

School Board Meeting:  This Tuesday night is another board meeting, where we are hoping for some more finalized direction for quarter to learning. As always, I will email you with any information or direction that comes out of Friday's meeting. 

I hope everyone had a restful and peaceful weekend. Ready for a fun and exciting week 8! -Ms. Shaw