Hi Blackberry parenting adults,

This week we had a lot of absences. Many of our friends were out sick. We continue to encourage mask usage if your child has a cough or sniffles.

This week we began working on telling time with both our 1st and 2nd graders. We are first looking at time to the hour and then moving to the half hour. They’ve been practicing writing the time as it appears on a digital clock, and in the ____ o’ clock.

This week our vocabulary words were: bride, circulate, detect, and furniture. We practice words with -old in them and -oo. We also practiced fluency. Fluency is made up of accuracy, expression, and the speed at which they read. We talked about reading with few errors, reading like you were talking, and changing our voices to read expressively. We sent home a passage about cats where we practiced our fluency. Please practice reading this passage at home. The sight word list has also been sent home. Please have your child practice reading or writing those words. This is the closest thing to homework I will be sending home!

For science and cultural studies we talked about the Portland ice storms and rice. We talked about the effects of an ice storm on people and how they can’t access anything they need during those times. We talked about rice being the most consumed food in the world and the water consumption.

We are working on creating a new invention to tackle one of the two issue mentioned above. For that project we will need recycled materials sent in. Please send any recycled materials you have, but we are mostly looking for cardboard boxes.

Today we had hat day! It was great to see the various choices. We also had a very successful lockdown drill and those lollipops sure worked keep everyone quiet! Thanks for the idea Danette.

Best,

Leslie