Happy Monday!! A quick shout out to Jonathan, Rose, Brayden, Alisa and Lillian for winning our classroom spelling bee last week!! Ryker will also be our alternate. All the kids did a wonderful job! We will hold our Olpe Elementary school bee this Friday. 

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Our novel unit is going great, and the kids are really enjoying it. We are reading the novel Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper. We are really focusing on the skills of story elements, theme, inferencing, characterization, vocabulary and figurative language. It is a story about a 5th grade girl with Cerebral Palsy who has a photographic memory and is a child genius, but no one knows because she cannot talk, walk or communicate in any way. The kids are loving it and learning a lot of great literary skills along the way. There are a lot of wonderful life lessons to take away from this book as well.

 

Tomorrow we will run 1 hour of our class using only a communication board that I made for each of them to communicate with. NO TALKING AT ALL!! This board resembles what Melody, the character in our book uses to communicate with since she cannot talk or sign. I am sure it will be an eye opener for everyone, and really difficult...even for me as the teacher!! 

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We have the K-State extension ladies coming to do a lesson Wednesday morning, and the school spelling bee on Friday, so we are not moving as fast as I had anticipated. With that being said, it is also important to note that we will be doing three assessments next week. DIBELS, winter MAPS and a predictive interim. So, that will slow us down even more. We will keep chugging away at it though! As a reminder, you will not see any grades in infinite campus until we complete the novel and novel unit packet. It is an on going assignment and is difficult to gather and grade daily, so I will be giving one large lump sum grade on this when we are finished! 

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One last ting....tomorrow the kids will take their 80 day quiz over all 80 word of the day words. I will remind them to take their words home tonight to study! I think that is about all the news this week! Thanks for stopping by to read this, and if you think about it, check in with your student and see what they think of our novel! :)

Mrs. Coffman

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