Welcome Back!

Welcome back after break!!!  December just flew by!  Now that we're back (and I'm healthy), it's great to start anew!

We have been working on our long vowel sounds in reading.  We use the term "sneaky e" to describe the silent e at the end of words that makes our vowels long.  Ask your students to tell you how it works!

We are also learning about singular and plural nouns.  We learned that "singular" sounds like "single," which means "one."

We have been doing a lot of addition and subtraction in math!  We learned about related addition facts, which are two addition facts with the addends switched:

3 + 4 = 7             4 + 3 = 7

We also learned about checking with subtraction, which is when we use a related subtraction problem to check our addition:

3 + 4 = 7        7 - 3 = 4

Put together, we can make Fact Families:  

3 + 4 = 7

4 + 3 = 7

7 - 3 = 4

7 - 4 = 3 

We recently finished a unit on Greece in social studies.  If you want to see what we talked about, you're welcome to visit my Greece Prezi.  We have just started Brazil, and are very excited to spend some time in South America!

We are still experiencing some illness at school.  We're talking about remembering to scrub our hands when we wash (sing the ABC's to know how long to wash), keep our hands away from our mouths, and cough into our sleeves.  It's also better to stay home a day to get all better than to try to work through it sometimes.  Here are some guidelines:

- If your child has had a fever, they cannot come back to school until they've been 24-hour fever-free without medicine.

- If your child has thrown up, they cannot come back to school for 24 hours.

- If your child is not focusing well and may have a difficult time learning due to his/her illness (coughing, stuffy nose, etc), then it may be better to keep them at home for a day and recoup and get better faster.

We've been following these guidelines and it's been working well, so THANK YOU!!!  Hopefully all these germs will go away soon!