Welcome back

I trust everyone had a lovely, long weekend with family and friends. I spent Thanksgiving Day with family in Tacoma and then had another celebration on Saturday. My cousins daughter turned 10. I managed to squeeze in a few runs that I hope mitigated some of the damage done by too many desserts. I ended the weekend decorating my little home for the holidays. There's something so relaxing about decorating a tree with Christmas carols playing in the background. All that has left me feeling energized and ready to begin a full week of learning with the brilliant scholars of Room 204. Here's what we'll be focusing on this week.

MATH

• Review for end of unit test
• Begin multiplication and division strategies for 6s, 7s, and 8s.

READING

• Making inferences

WRITING

• Character Analysis-We are beginning our first big writing project of the year. This five paragraph expository paragraph will focus on analyzing a character from a story read this year. The essay is expected to take three weeks from the initial prewriting stage to the final publishing stage. This week, we are gathering text evidence for the prewriting stage. Students are using web maps to record multiple adjectives to describe their characters. They will be citing references from the text to support use of those adjectives.

SCIENCE

• Finishing up our weather and climate unit with a engineering design challenge.

SOCIAL STUDIES

• Locating and identifying 25 of the 50 states
• Locating and identifying the four ocean, seven continents, and four hemispheres.

Have a great week.