Happy Monday.

Good evening Footprints Families:

Thanks for your patience. Sorry for such a late post tonight. First of all, I am curious to know how many Vikings fans we have, and how many Packers fans we have. I know our house was disappointed with how the big game went tonight. :-) Better luck next week.

Today was another great day at Footprints. We are definitely getting more into our schedule, and things are falling into place. We have jumped head first into our reading response journals, writer's workshop (we are currently working on memoirs), our book genre of the month (September is mystery books), Daily Oral Language (grammar practice), read aloud (FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER) and choosing just the "right" game to get us going in our morning meetings.

Today we introduced two new things to the kids. We did a mini lesson on our new math textbooks (Saxon Math curriculum--a great curriculum specialized in targeting instruction to individual needs) and took a pre-test on a review unit of adding and subtracting whole numbers, decimals and money. Tomorrow we will start small group instruction in this unit. We are really excited about watching the kids grow in math.

I also introduced the kids to a new social studies project. To coincide with Student Council elections, we are doing a study on the American government system. Today we had a great research/note taking/small group discussion session on the three branches of the government. We did some review, and learned a lot of new information. It is safe to say we may have some budding politicians in our room! We will be using this new information to help us form 3 new political parties in our room. Each group of five students will be choosing a party name, slogan, symbol, and party platform. We will work on campaigning and speech writing--two great skills which our Student Council candidates will find useful. The kids were really excited about this project. I can't wait to see where they will take it.

I will try and remember my camera to take some pictures of the kids hard at work tomorrow, so you can see more of what we do. Feel free to stop in and visit with us anytime. Look for monthly reading calendars to come home this week to help you keep track of how much your student is reading.

And yes---you measure a rattlesnake's rattle with decibels because decibels measure sound. Congrats to all of our classroom winners. We had a lot!

Happy Monday, and go Vikings:-)