I'm back!

Well, it is a new month and I'm going to recommit to getting this blog back up and running!
Without telling you my whole life story, I do want to share with my HMS family a picture from March 2008 that is now one of my prized possessions.

This is my grandfather, H, and grandmother, Barbara, with me and my husband, Dave, when we visited them in the spring. Barbara passed away on the night of September 4th and H. soon followed her home on September 14th. It has been a difficult month for me but I have appreciated every act of kindness from my colleagues, students, friends and family.

In all the craziness of the start of the school year, I forgot to introduce you to Kayla, a 10-year-old who joins us for math. She is a great addition to our group and the boys work well with her. Welcome, Kayla!

Speaking of math, we are currently working on a unit called "How Many Rooms, How Many Floors." It is an introduction to patterns, ratios and multiplication. We are also practicing coin values, time to the hour/half hour and addition facts. I expect the students to have fluency in all of their addition facts this year! Some will also be required to learn subtraction.

The students are getting a lot of one-on-one attention as you can see! They are all working on various activities at the same time -they rotate through 4 centers during the second half of math every day: a math game with Jana, addition flashcards with Cathy, independent math reading and a review/intro lesson with me.

Agustin is finding the ratio between rhombuses and hexagons! (It's 1:3!)

For math homework, the students have a review worksheet and are expected to practice their flashcards with a parent nightly.

I'll update about our English Language Arts curriculum soon!
They've been doing GREAT work and I want to make sure to get some work samples to demonstrate!

Thanks for hanging in there while I work out the kinks here. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think! :)