We did it! 5 Days!

I was so thankful for a "normal" five-day week last week! I know by Friday, I was exhausted but having our regular routine back was so nice! We finished STEM Monday and even got back to our normal schedule in the classroom. I feel renewed by this, and I hope your children do too!

We finished Lost on a Mountain in Maine in language arts on Friday. We have some fun follow-up pieces to do on Monday as we learn more about Donn Fendler's amazing rescue. Our comprehension and writing activities in our Reading Journals are done, though. If your child needs to submit the LOMM Reading Journal this weekend, please make sure it gets finished tonight. 

This week we will start focusing on survival in natural disasters. We have a special guest speaker visiting our fourth-grade classrooms on Tuesday. This will kick off our fun "I Survived" book series. I know the children love to read these, so I am looking forward to navigating them together. It is a nice balance of opinion, research, and creative comprehension activities. 

In addition to reading those books, I will encourage children to pick a book to read in April for a book report. It can be any novel, but it does need to be one they haven't read before. I will mention that this week but the official book report requirements won't come home until the end of the month. 

In science, we started our unit on Earth's Resources. Miss Rice did a fantastic job leading the class on a lab that allowed them to visualize sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks by putting starbursts through pressure and heat treatments. This week we will focus on minerals, weathering, and erosion. I suspect your children can already sing the difference between weathering and erosion for you; you should ask them!

Thank you for all of the wipes and paper towels! We are all set on both for now. We hope the number of COVID cases continues to decline, of course. Still, we will keep up our table-wiping all year regardless. It helps us all to stay healthy... and makes the room smell good!

Dates to Know:
March 8 - Guest speaker for fourth grade survivalists
March 9 - Builder's Club after school
March 11 - PTA Meeting
March 14 - Pi Day!
March 17 - St. Patrick's Day
March 18 - No school for students
March 24 - Magical Theater Performances