This was a wonderful surprise to start the week!  (I was sure video games would be the winner.)  Life-long learners begin as eager readers!  Thank you for encouraging your child to read!!!  :-)

I have decided to wait until next week to begin our money unit because of ACCESS testing and Early Release Conferences.  Today we activated our prior knowledge about money on our kidblog.  Ask your child to read what they wrote to you!  I am very impressed with all they know about money so far!!

REMINDER - TOMORROW IS CLASS PICTURE DAY!!!

Friday was the 100th day of school!  It was so fun to celebrate and play games with the number 100!  We also got to see the kindergardeners in their parade!  

Reflection is one of my favorite parts of being a teacher, and it is so nice to reflect and review the last 100 days with your children.  We have learned and grown so much together!  

This week we continued to review and build our number sense, started writing delicious hamburger paragraphs, worked at our new & improved Spelling and Language Centers, and we celebrated the 100th day!  

Our class newsletter, Frylights, will be coming home tomorrow (Thursday).  You can also click to enlarge the images below, or you can download it here.

We have started a daily graph on the Activeboard as a part of our Morning Message.  We have been working with lots of graphing vocabulary as we discuss and compare the data on our graphs!  Here are some of the graphs we've worked on recently:

Parent-Teacher conferences will take place on February 2 & 3. 
Please return your conference preference forms on Monday.  I will send you your conference time on Friday, Jan. 27.  I will try to accomodate everyone to the best of my ability!

If you received information about Honors Breakfast, please return the bottom of the paper on Monday so that I can plan accordingly. 

Your children and I can't wait to celebrate our successes!

Our class had a very busy week!  We had a lot of work to catch-up on from the snow days.  Here is a slide-show of some of the things we did this week:

We also worked on our kidblog this week.  It is now public so that parents can read our posts.  You can visit it here.

I hope you're enjoying the snow this week!  I don't know about you, but I am READY to get back in the classroom!  Be sure to check the GCPS website for calendar updates due to the snow days.  I will also post calendar updates here as I receive them.  

In the event that we continue to have off tomorrow (Friday), please remember that Monday is a holiday for MLK Day!  If you have specific questions about meetings or events that were cancelled because of the snow, please contact me through e-mail.  (As always, you can contact me by phone when school resumes, 770-931-5701.)  

I've made some updates to our website.  Check out the new Students page for links to some of our favorite authors' websites!  I plan to add more links to games and websites as well.  I will also update the newest edition of Frylights as soon as it is translated.  

I am happy to announce that we are almost finished our class book!  Last week, we learned about the writing process as each student created their own page for the book.  Thanks to another MES teacher, we will be sending our book to be published!  Please see your child's BEE Book for information about purchasing a book at a discounted rate.

We had a class meeting to decide on a topic.  Your children chose the theme "When I grow up..."  We completed "drafts,"  applied our knowledge of editing, and created professional "good copies" and illustrations!  I can't wait to see the whole book together!  

Here are some photos of your children working on their illustrations.  We decided to work hard like Jan Brett (one of our favorite authors).  She spends 1 hour on each square inch of her illustrations!  That means it can take her up to one week to finish only one illustration!  Learn more here.

Welcome to 2011!  It is so great to be back together in school! 

We accomplished two big tasks today in our class:

First, we created our Spelling Notebooks.  In these books, we will record our spelling words and complete different activities to help us remember them.  We also created spelling flash cards for the first ten words which we used to practice with a partner.  It was a fun morning of spelling!

You can see the words we wrote on the ActiveBoard below:

After spelling, we started creating a class book!  This book will be published by a real publisher!  I will be sending home information about the book this week.  All of the parent forms need to be returned in order for our class to receive a free copy for our library, so please check your child's BEE Book.

We decided as a class that our topic would be "When I grow up..."  Your children wrote some amazing things!  I can't wait to start illustrating!