Thank you all for your active participation in parent teacher conferences. We really enjoyed meeting with all of you and look forward to teaming with you this year. We are all looking forward to the Grade 1 field trip to Hacienda Hay and Feed on Thursday, October 30, (this is a free dress day). Following the long weekend and conferences the students returned fully prepared to take on the work ahead. In math this week we concentrated on the practical meaning of place value, digit/s, and numbers through the building of numbers up to 100. This was accomplished using base ten blocks and place value sheets. Mental math is now a primary component to our daily transitions where students are practicing strategies for holding numbers in their heads for short term retrieval as well as solving long strings of numbers by mentally manipulating them. In literacy, we worked on identifying setting, character perspectives, and main events. Fundations continues with the introduction of sentence structure, phrasing, trick word practice, and new vocabulary. Students have now moved into the editing phase of their independent writing where they are attending to meaning, capitals, and periods. In reading we are exploring the vowel digraphs and word endings. In history, students began their study of Native Americans with an exploration of artifacts such as leather, arrow heads, abalone rattles, reed whitles, etc. The students are in the process of writing and editing their essays on Native Americans. This week in Social Sciences students began Feurstein's instrumental enrichment with the "Organization of Dots." Thank you for all of your efforts with nightly reading it is such a great support for building academic stamina. Be sure to drop a note in the homework folder if a book or Lexia level is too easy/too hard and we will adjust it.