Brrr!!!  This week's weather was quite a change from two weeks ago!  Thank you for sending warm gear for recess!

Our days were very full this week, with Fire Safety, Picture Day, and TWO Mystery Readers!  The first one was Mr. Quinn, a friend of Mrs. Cole's who is an optician.  He told us how he helps people get just the right glasses so they can see better.  Our other guest was Dr. David Jefferson, who has been the veterinarian for Mrs. Cole's horses for many years.  He told us all about how he takes care of animals and teaches their owners how to care for them too.
 . In STEM we did some leaf investigations and read about how and why leaves change color in the fall.  Ask us about chlorophyll! :)

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We're doing a great job with place value and decomposing numbers/writing them in expanded form!  Thanks for helping us find other opportunities to practice this at home-it's big thinking!  I am also hearing kids skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s!
                                         
Thank you for keeping our reading books in our reading folders, and returning them on Mondays so we can swap them out. :)

Homework folders (the green folder with the homework menu and blank reading calendar) are due on November 5th.  Thanks for helping us complete squares on our menu and tally our books!

Congratulations to Jacy and Shyanne on earning the privilege of taking Darla and Kola home for the weekend!

Congratulations to Kai for doing Quality Work, which we posted in the Quality Work Showcase!

I hope everyone has a fun weekend planned!  I am going to a teachers' conference in Rockport and hoping to complete outdoor fall cleanup at home.  Enjoy your family time!

Becca

Hello, families!
I hope you got a chance to enjoy that last burst of summer earlier this week-wow!

We had a blast with place value math centers, our first WIN time (intervention time) rotations with Mrs. Stover's and Mrs. Bernier's classes, and continuing our work in literacy and writing.  This week's STEM lesson was all about rainbows, and we even made our own rainbows using a flashlight and a prism.  I am sending home a prism on Monday for each child to use/keep-see if they can explain how white light enters a prism and the colors disperse and refract to make a spectrum. :)

Book orders were submitted and should be here in ten days or so.  Thank you for ordering!

School shirt order forms were sent home last week-proceeds benefit our Cultural Arts Committee's work and provide opportunities for cultural experiences for our students.

Thank you for sending a written note in the morning if your child's dismissal will be different.  I am supposed to send a written note with children to the cafeteria if they are not usually dismissed on that day, per school policy.  Thanks for your help!

We're bringing home several pieces of writing to review with our families.  Things to look for are:

-complete thoughts
-correct use of upper/lower case letters
-beginning to use punctuation consistently
-multiple thoughts/sentences per page
-carefully formed letters
-sight words spelled correctly
-all sounds in a word are represented (even if the word isn't spelled correctly)
-no scribbling; colorful, detailed illustrations

Our Mystery Reader this week was...Mr. Joe Swenson!  Mr. Swenson is an actor, author, and consultant.  He is also a dad of two little boys and friends with Maine author Chris Van Dusen!  We enjoyed his reading and hearing about how he goes about writing his books. 

Congratulations to Rosie, Amelia, Clemmie, and Aubrey for earning the privilege of hosting Darla and Kola for the past 2 weekends!

We are close to earning 25 "Caught You Being Good" cards!  I wonder what the kids will choose as their celebration???

I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!  I had a meeting all day on Saturday in Augusta, but I did manage some outdoor time on this beautiful October Sunday, visiting friends on their farm in Union, Maine and spending a few hours at the ocean.

:)

Becca