Friday, December 3

**Special thanks to our parents who've been coming in and reading Christmas stories to our class!** If you'd still like to sign up, please contact Delora Argyle.

Reading: We will be finishing up Book Groups before Christmas Break. Some groups will have a little bit longer reading assignments. We'll officially be starting into questioning this next week, as well as doing a fun Greek story.

Writing: We're working on publishing our Personal Narratives. We've also been free writing about our most embarrassing moments. We'll have more publishing time in the weeks to come.

Spelling/Vocabulary: CONGRATS to Haydon Cooper--he earned 100% on his Vocabulary test. Overall, I'm pleased with the vocabulary results. If you were a student who is not pleased with your score or if you received less than 80%, come talk to Miss Blaisdell about ways to improve your test score. Spelling words this past week were Greek words. Next week we'll be onto week 13--ation or ion word endings. We're starting new vocabulary logs next week. Students need to make sure they are finishing these in class and writing sentences with the correct vocabulary word usage.

Math: We continue to work with adding and subtracting fractions. About halfway through next week we will begin a math/art project called fraction flowers. I love this project because it gives the students who love art time to express this talent during math. The sixth grade has started doing math rotations every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. As sixth grade teachers we hope that all students are being challenged and able to be successful in math. The rotations should help with this as each student hopefully gets the math challenge that they need.

Science: Students put a piece of bread in a bag. They decided what variables they thought would help mold grow on their bread. They then either added to the bag or kept it the same and placed it somewhere in the classroom to grow mold. It will be interesting to see what is growing after the weekend.

Social Studies: We learned about two major City-States during Ancient Greek times: Sparta and Athens. Students compared them to the civilizations of the Assyrians and Babylonians. One civilization focuses on the entire being: not only doing strength training but training their minds as well, the other is completely focused on being strong warriors. Ask your student which is which.