Weather, math, and feelings....

We have been talking, reading and writing about weather. On Friday we read a book called "Thunder Cake" and baked a thunder cake of our own in a crock pot. Our room sure smelled good!

We work on many math concepts during calendar time. One thing we have talked about is odd and even numbers. We always discuss why a number is odd or even. We made odd and even houses to hang on our bulletin board. We also have been practicing counting by 5's and 10's - we made some turkeys from our hands to help us count.
Our next Skills for Learning lessons focus on empathy. We will be learning how to identify emotions on other peoples' faces and talking a lot about how we are feeling and how other people might be feeling. Our goal will be to help our students express their feelings with words, especially if they need help with something.
Next Wednesday Loon Lake will begin our Pay It Forward Project. Each student will bring home a Pay It Forward card with a number on it. With your help, we hope your son will do an act of kindness for someone and give them the card. The act of kindness can be anonymous if you wish, and you can just leave the card. There is information and some videos about it on our PBIS Blog at http://loonlakeelementarypbs.blogspot.com/ .  I hope you will have fun and I hope it will be a positive way for your child to begin to think about other people.
I will be attending a special education inservice on Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 11 and 12 so there will be a substitute teacher in the room with Mrs. Aldrich and Mrs. Couveau. I would much rather be in the classroom, but sometimes our district requires us to have training on new forms etc.  This is a very nice class of boys, and I know they will do a good job while I am gone.
I want to remind you that Parent Teacher Conferences are on Thursday, November 14 - there is no school for children that day. I will send report cards home with your children on Wednesday, November 13.