Monday the 8th

I hope everyone enjoyed their three day weekend and managed to stay dry and warm.  I hope you enjoyed the Fall Festival and have recovered from the greasy menu that it has to offer.  I may be working off that Donut Bank Burger for a few weeks.  Today I feel like we got a great start to the week.  I introduced two new topics and everyone seemed to be cacthing on rather quickly.  I introduced summarizing the text.  I explained that if I could retell the important parts of the story and who was in the story then I can summarize.  We will be reading all week and working on this skill.  If you are reading the stories at home ask questions that make your students summarize what they have read.  Ask them about the characters and what they have been doing and how thye may overcome a problem.  The other big topic this week is plural nouns.  We already knew that a noun is a person, place, thing or animal.  We now know that plural means more than one and we have to add an -s, or -es to make some nouns plural.  We will continue this week with plural nouns and talk more in depth about mouse becoming mice, and loaf becoming loaves.  We did talk about squares today.  This was an easy topic for everyone.  We did talk about verticies and edges.  Shapes are on the report card, so this week is all about squares, circles, rectangles and triangles.  We also had a visitor come in today.  My sister, Lindsay, who is studying pharmacy at Purdue and on a short break, came in and read with some students.  She helped out with improving our reading skills and asked questions about the stories that were read.