Reminder: Tomorrow is early release.  There is no lunch, however, your child will still need a snack! Also, Scholastic Book Orders are due tomorrow.  You can order online! I'll submit the orders after school tomorrow. 

The kids took their decoding test today in language arts.  We were shooting for doing one point better than last week, and many of them succeeded with this goal!  We also finished up our centers this morning.  The kids started writing a story a few days ago and today we had to do a little re-working of some of them.  I LOVE their passion and enthusiasm for writing, but some of the stories were getting a little too lengthy for this particular assignment, which was just about one event!  We had a discussion how these longer stories are wonderful for creating writing and can be worked on as seat work during the day, but for our "lessons" we have to stick to the topic and focus on certain skills that will help us in our creative writing as well.  We did manage to have time to work on revising many of the stories.  Homework tonight is to re-read My Brother Martin and page 18 from the reader's notebook. 

We reviewed chapter 1 in math and the kids took the chapter 1 math test.  We used the book test this time.  I don't always use the same form for the test, but they are familiar with the layout of this test from last year (they did it as seat work), so we did it this way.  

I assigned groups for our upcoming social studies project, which is a region report.  The work will be done in class.

We read about the punishment God gave Cain during religion today.  Then the kids drew Cain and Abel in their notebooks and wrote a paragraph summarizing the story of the first murder.