Happy Hanukkah!

Today is the first day of Hanukkah.  Yesterday, Mr. and Mrs. Mashaal taught us many things about the Hanukkah Celebration.  Mrs. Tan joined our class in the grouproom and we listened to a story about how Families celebrate this special holiday and how they light a candle for each of the eight days of Hanukkah on the Menorah.  We then played with dreidels, made beautiful dreidel stain glass (paper) for our windows, colored Hanukkah pictures and ate delicious "sufganiyot" (jelly-filled doughnuts) and "latkes" (potato pancakes). 

We want to give the Mashaal Family a big thanks!!!  We love Celebrations!  One of the things we talked about in class is how all celebrations from different countries and cultures have two main things in common; families gather and eat amazing food.

Happy Hanukkah!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

What a great day we've had!  We read about Thanksgiving and thought about all the things we are very thankful for.  Wow!  We are pretty fortunate to have such amazing families, being in great health, having a great school, having food and water and much more.

At the end of the day, we had pumpkin pie!  Yum!!!

Ms. Nora and I hope you have a wonderful and restful Thanksgiving Holiday with your family and friends.

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Writing Celebration - Writing for Readers

Hurray for the Amazing Authors!  During this unit, we talked about what makes our writing easy to read or hard to read.  We then looked at our stories in our folders and divided them into two piles- hard to read and easy to read.  Together we came up with a big chart of the different reasons those stories were hard to read:

This story was hard to read because:

• the words were smashed together - no finger spaces
• we erased the work too much and it looked messy
• no periods and capitals
• we did not stretch the words and added vowels
• the letters were all capitals
• messy handwriting

They then chose an easy to read story to revise.  They first revised it by themselves, then had their writing partners revise it with them. 

Today during our Writing Celebration, we invited our reading buddies from fourth grade to read our stories.  They loved it!!  They were also very impressed with our Authors' work.  HIP HIP HURRAY!!

Check out the pictures of our Writing Celebration.

Readers Use Strategies to Read Celebration

This week, our super Readers had their Reading Celebration by presenting different Reader's Theaters.


During this unit of study, Readers Use Print Strategies,  our kids learned to get their minds ready to read by using strategies to figure out words by reading with fluency.  Our students began to use strategies they learned when reading unfamiliar words and began to read with more fluency by using meaning, punctuation and clues in text.


Check out the Reader's Theater Presentations below.

Finding Lady Liberty by Aiden, Sophia, Mickey and Nila

Into the Maze by Catherine, John, Simran and Sueah

A Noise in the Night by Ave, Aki, Lillian and Shea

Finding Gold by Ella, Kai, Yan and Graham

The Fun House by Madeline, Sebastian, Mira and Kurtis

Little India Field Trip

Deepavali, the Festival of Lights!  We went on a field trip to Little India to see the preparations for Deepavali.  We walked around Campbell Lane and shopped for oil candles, peacock feathers and Deepavali cards.  We then ate dahl at the Kamala Restaurant.  It was delicious!  After that, we went to the wet market.  We got to touch different fish, even a shark.  Poor shark!!  The last place we visited in Little India was the temple.  What a beautiful place. 

We then met everyone back on our bus and went to Fort Canning for our picnic lunch. After lunch, the kids got to run up and down the hill.  What fun we had!!

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Halloween by Kurtis

I love Halloween and the party at school was great!  I was so scary and my friends had great costumes as well.  We went on a parade then we played games in the class. 

Check out the pictures!

Pumpkin Patch by Jessica

Wow, what fun we had at the pumpkin patch.  Dr. Mutsch read us a great story.  Then we got to choose a little pumpkin to take home.  It was great!

Click here to see pictures of the pumpkin patch.