OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER:  DECEMBER 1-5, 2025

Theme (science/social studies/literacy): After reading Native Values: Living In Harmony by Rosita Kaahani Worl, student groups will work on painting small canvases to depict a tribal value of their choice. We are reading Aurora: A Tale of the Northern Lights by Mindy Dwyer, with a focus on character traits: physical and personality traits. Later in the week we will begin a new theme!  We will be starting a science unit on the states of matter!

Writing: This week we will be looking at how using strong verbs can strengthen writing! Students will learn how they can use a thesaurus to find stronger verb choices. We will use a game of verb charades to start this conversation! Students will write in their journals about their Thanksgiving holiday as well as finish up a cinquain poem they were writing about turkey!

Language: The students will take do a learning check about nouns, verbs and adjectives. We have also begun learning about plural noun endings.. Right now our focus is on adding "s" and "es." 

Phonics: 

Bears: digraphs (ph, wh, ng, and nk)

Eagles: "r" controlled vowels (ar, or, ore)

Heart/High Frequency Words: (Heart words don’t always follow the rules and we often have to remember their spellings “by heart”. HF words appear most often in texts)

Bears: who, by, my, one, once

Eagles: few, food, four, full, girl, 

(Both grades are exposed and practice both sets of words) 

Math:

2nd: We will be working on solving one step word problems incorporating addition and subtraction. Students will be able to determine the information that are "clues" within problems and identify key words for determining which operation to use. 

3rd: This students are completing a learning check about strategies for adding greater numbers and we are learning about rounding/estimating. As they do so, we will be adding 4-digit place value concepts as they consider how to round these numbers...(what is the nearest thousand?)

Special Activities Last Week: We spent a great deal of time getting ready for the Tea of Thanks! How awesome it was that every child in our class had a special guest come! Thank you for joining us!

This Week: This week we will begin a culminating project with the 4/5 class based around the book we read together Who was Milton Hershey? On Friday we will go see the Nutcracker ballet as a class! Prior to doing that, we will explore the soundtrack and read the book. When we return we will have All School Centers!

Announcements:

Marmot of the Week:  Levi (Continued)

Birthdays-None

Upcoming events-

-December 5-Nutcracker viewing at JDHS, All School Centers

-December 12-Next swim/library trip, All School Centers

-December 19-Holiday party, Last school day before winter break!

*Please see ALL posted links for important information!