This week during Class Meeting, we discussed honesty.  We shared reasons that it's sometimes tough to tell the truth.  We might be embarrassed, fear a negative consequence, or not feel super confident about we handled the situation.  Telling the truth is tough, but students expressed it's important to do so that we can building trust within our friendships and family relationships.  I have to say their wisdom on this topic blew me away.  I started thinking about the way I speak to kids when I know they're at a truth-telling crossroads.  I've found that, as a teacher, the best way to begin the conversation sounds something like this:  "I know one of the things kids and grownups have to work on all the time is being completely honest.  It's so important because it helps us learn to trust one another in the future.  I want to talk with you about something, and I'm hoping you'll choose to be completely truthful..."  I used that intro three times this week, and it worked like a charm!  Kids understood the importance of being transparent, and each of them showed a sense of pride for doing the right thing despite the previous mistake.  When it came time for consequences, they were willing to take responsibility.  Sure, these conversations take more time, and if you're anything like me, you might have to wait until you're in a calm state of mind to effectively communicate, but doing so gives kids a positive experience with 'fessing up to their wrongdoings.  The more positive experiences they have in doing this, the more likely they are to be truthful going forward.  Enough from me :), Here's a great article about how to teach honesty to kids.

• Monday, November 9th
• Crestwood's Support-a-Family continues, donate paper products this week.  
• Chess Club after school
• Girls on the Run after school 
• Wednesday, November 11th
• Veteran's Day assembly @ 2:30 pm
• Girls on the Run after school 
• PTO @ 6:30 pm - all parents welcome!
• Thursday, November 12th
• Dad's Club @ 7:30-8:30 pm, Smugala's - all dads welcome! 
• Friday, November 13th
• Ms. Meese's birthday!
• Scholastic book orders are due.  Parents, if you'd like to purchase books as a surprise holiday gift for your child, place your order online, shoot me an email letting me know to secretly hold onto the book when it arrives, and you can pick it up from school anytime between its arrival and our December break.  
• Jingles 4 Jammies - bring loose change to donate to Crestwood's Support-a-Family and wear pajamas.
• Dance-a-Rama @ 6:30-8:30 pm

...for all of the food items that have been donated as part of Crestwood's Support-a-Family.  My heart is full knowing that our school community takes care of each other.  

Reader's Workshop
     We focused on main idea of informational text this week.  The main idea is the overall topic of a text.  Authors use details throughout their writing that support the main idea.  They often give clues to the main idea in the title, headings, highlighted terms, beginning sentence, or ending sentence.  Students practiced reading short informational texts and recording the main idea and supporting details using a box & bullets graphic organizer.
     We also explored a new website, Capstone Library (username: crestwoodes, password: school).  Students enjoyed using this site because it offers a variety of high interest texts and will even read books aloud to students.

Math

     In Math, we continued studying different strategies for solving 2x1 digit multiplication problems.  Students practiced using models (rods & cubes), the break apart strategy, repeated addition, the traditional method, and the distributive property.  It's important we keep encouraging students to practice multiplication facts so that the next few weeks of more advanced multiplication and division feel manageable and not too frustrating.  At school, we played a new game, Zap it!, to work on our fluency.  At home, try doing practice verbally with your child.  If they are having trouble, help him/her make a t-chart of that set of facts and let him/her use as needed.  

Writer's Workshop
    We took a some time in between genre units of study to work on some of the basic skills of writing.  Students learned the structure of a complete paragraph, and we applied that format to write about our Halloween party.  We also completed some word ladders.  Word ladders are puzzles that require us to manipulate words by rearranging, deleting, and adding letters. We were able to harvest some new words during this activity as well:  dame, slosh, jot, and more.