Dear Families,

Welcome to Week 2. We began math groups this week. First graders join Mrs. Orr’s class and second graders are with me. Some children are working with combinations of ten using several card games. We are all getting back in the practice of adding numbers together, remember what tens partners are, reviewing double addition, such as 7+7, and adding a number to 10, such as 8+10 or 14+10. Within the next couple of days we will be reading a book about a magic pot that doubles everything, which will give us practice writing double addition word problems. Other children in this group are working on double digit addition and finding combinations of number cards that equal as close to 100 as possible. This requires a great deal of thinking and ability to be flexible with numbers. In addition, this group has also worked with some Guinness World Book of Records data, such as the family known to have the most children ever—a Russian family 250 years ago had 69 children as a result of twin, triplet and quadruplet births. We had fun making a chart with running totals to figure out how many of each multiple births there must have been to equal 69 children.

We are slowly getting into our reading groups. Some children are learning letter sounds and how to slide these sounds together. Others are continuing on where they left off last year with spelling patterns and rules for sounding out more difficult syllables. Others have begun to work with adjectives and adverbs, and building comprehension and fluency. Please note that if your child is just learning how to read, I have sent you a separate email regarding the homework that will occur several times within each week.

One of our fun projects for the week was a brown paper bag activity. After reading What Can I Do With a Paper Bag? , we each had our own brown paper bag to make a creation of our choosing. We had beautiful masks, hats, airplanes, puppets, and fairy houses!

We had a special visitor today named Karen Kurzman. If your child was in first grade last year, you may recall she visited us then to teach how to write a response to text using a book titled Rose Meets Mr. Wintergarten. This year she will teach us more about writing and the components of writing a narrative or story.

I hope you all enjoy the upcoming weekend, and had a lovely Labor Day weekend. I learned something last weekend when taking my daughter back to college 10 hours away into Canada. Here’s some advice from what I learned: Never, EVER, let your 19-year-old-almost-adult sign a lease for an apartment without your permission. After 13 hours of cleaning the dirtiest place I’ve ever seen, I was still not able to remove the stench of dead mice from the refrigerator’s evaporation tray. Granted it’s an old house, but we discovered that my daughter’s bedroom is not insulated and it’s heated by electricity. The landlady didn’t have a copy of the lease for the apartment my daughter originally signed a lease for, but we did, and it was one we had pictures for and information for. Not the apartment she eventually moved into. The landlady also didn’t want three separate checks each month from the three girls. Instead, one girl was suppose to be responsible for the full amount each month in a check, and then have to get the rent money from the other two, even though they all signed the lease. That means one girl would be responsible for all of the $13,000 up front. That’s when I lost it, and commanded Caity to pack up and she was coming home. Caity had had it, also, and began to pack. At that point, the landlady changed her mind about payment and I’ve become acquainted with the Office of the Rentalsman in the province of New Brunswick. Needless to say, my daughter is learning the value of burning incense, and that maybe—just maybe—her mother was right last spring when she told her an apartment during her second year into college was a bad idea. I’m looking forward to a quieter, saner and odor-free weekend coming up.