January 6, 2015 BIG NEWS!!!!!!

Welcome back and Happy New Year! It was exciting to see everyone after the 2 week break.  The students started the day with some time to share and write about their holidays.  We were thrilled that the students were very quick to remember our classroom expectations so that we have the best possible learning environment.

BIG NEWS...... Ms. Rauser is getting closer to having her baby so this will be her last week of teaching with us.  Her last day is Friday, January 10th.   Miss Jackson will be in room 79 all week working with Ms. Rauser to prepare to take over starting next week.  We will miss Ms. Rauser and wish her all the best as she prepares for the arrival of baby.  We welcome Miss Jackson to our classrooms.  Ms. Rauser promises to bring baby for a meet and greet after baby arrives:)

We started to discuss letter writing today to start preparing for writing letters to experts as we continue on our inquiry journal.  We discussed the difference between friendly letters and business letters. Our focus will be on business letters and we will begin practicing tomorrow.  As a practice, the students will be writing Ms. Rauser a letter to ask her questions about Africa.  Ms. Rauser knows a lot about Africa and visited there to learn even more.  We are working on our Tanga art project and would benefit from knowing more about Africa.  Students have been asked to think of some questions to ask Ms. Rauser in the letter they will write to her.

Mrs. Cooper's math group worked on subtracting today - we made some interesting discoveries about subtracting 2 digit numbers.  The students were trying to figure our how to subtract a number when the first number in the ones is smaller than the second number in the ones.  Hmmmmm... we know that we can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number. e.g. (74-47=).  Ms. Rauser's math group did a quick review and then some word problems to get the Miss Jackson familiar with what we have been working on.

Please help your child to dress appropriately for the weather - hats, mittens, snow pants and boots are all needed to be warm enough outside!

DOOR CHANGES... Both room 79 and room 80 will now be using Door 1 as we did at the beginning of the year.  Our students practiced using these doors today and will continue to use them for the remainder of the year.