Update January 17, 2014

Happy New Year Room 14 Families!
I hope that you all had a wonderful break.  I know that I enjoyed my time off with my two little boys, Cooper and Logan.  We had the chance to visit with family, go to the zoo, and of course play with all the new toys that they got for Christmas.

Now that we are back from break, we are just as busy as always in room 14.  Last week we started unit 5 in math that is all about multiplying larger numbers.  This a a short unit and we will be wrapping it up early next week and will be taking the unit test on Thursday, Jan. 23rd.  In reading we finished up our last article in the current issue of National Geographic Explorer which was "Attack of the Germs".  This seemed fitting with all the colds going around lately.  For writing we began our next genre of study, Response to Literature.  We have spent time looking at samples of other students responses and then this week we read a short story together as a class. We are now in the process of writing a three paragraph response to it together.  In social studies we are continuing with the current unit and are learning more about the influence of the Spanish in California.  Soon we will be studying about the mission system and I plan to assign a research project to go along with it.  I will be sending out more information as soon as I assign it to the class.  In science we investigated with magnets and learned that as the distance between two magnets increases, the force will decrease.  We also used a compass and iron filings to detect magnets hidden in boxes. 

Since next week is a short week due to Monday's holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., we will not be doing spelling. 

Lastly I wanted to give a big congratulations to Ronak from our class.  This week he was our class representative in the school wide spelling bee.  Ronak did an amazing job and place 3rd over all.  We are so proud of his hard work and effort!  He spelled some very tough words that I would have had trouble with myself.  Well done Ronak!

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Mrs. Barkve