Happy Thanksgiving!

This week flew by on Team Esprit! It's hard to believe it's already the Thanksgiving break.  Please remember that we do not have school next week. School will resume on November 27th.

We started the week with community building activity:  helping to make Stone Soup that would be served for lunch to the whole school on Wednesday!  We visited the cafeteria and spent time peeling and chopping vegetables for this school-wide soup.  We chopped onions, carrots, butternut squash, kale, garlic, sweet potatoes, and potatoes.  Be sure to ask your child how he or she helped in the soup-making process!

During Writer's Workshop, we continued to work on our nonfiction expert books. The children have been drafting and are beginning to move into the editing and revising steps of the writing process.  We also used mentor nonfiction texts to help us write interesting introductions and conclusions.  At what stage of the writing process is your child?

At Reader's Workshop, we are still focusing on nonfiction, but have moved toward narrative  nonfiction.  These are books with true facts and information told in the form of a story. We have been introduced to and have been reading many biographies.  As the children have been reading the biographies, they have been stopping and jotting down notes about the events of the person's life and why the person is important.  Ask your child about some of the biographies he or she has read this week!

In math, we spent the week focusing on rounding numbers, estimation, and multi-digit addition.  The children were introduced to the concept of rounding numbers to the nearest ten and nearest hundred.  We also played three games to practice these skills: Round Ball Tens, Round and Add Tens, and Round Ball Hundreds.  We solved story problems and worked on strategies for solving triple-digit addition problems.  We learned an efficient strategy called "give and take" to use when adding.  Can your child explain that to you?  After our break, we will turn our attention to three-digit subtraction problems and strategies!

Thank you to those of you who sent in recipes for our Esprit Cookbook for the craft fair and for the rocks to make Kindness Rocks.  We will be working on those two projects the week we get back from our Thanksgiving Break.  If you are interested in volunteering to run our Esprit table at the craft fair, please let Deb or Jenn know and we can send you the link for the sign up.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!  Enjoy your time with family and friends!