Welcome back to school in 2009!  January will be a busy month for us.  We would first like to welcome our new student teacher to our classroom.  Miss Josephson will be with us for about 3 months.  We are excited to get to know her and even more excited for her to see what a fabulous 4th grade she is coming to with great students.  

**We will be busy getting back into our guided reading groups.  We will be reading some great new non-fiction and fiction books.  We will read about Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges.  

**We will be doing a quick review with some multiplication and moving quickly on to division.  We look forward to showing off our long division skills.  

**We will be writing about our New Year's Resolutions, as well as, making a class movie about our resolutions.  We will post it on our blog when we are done.

**We will also be getting back into the swing of Writer's Workshop as we learn more about the Six Traits of Writing.  We have talked a lot about ideas and organization, and now we will focus on sentence fluency and voice.  

**We will spend two weeks on some music skills as we prepare for our fourth grade program that will be coming up in February (we hope!)  

**January will also be the kick-off of our science units.  We will be learning about dinosaurs of Utah and studying all about fossils.  

**Thanks for continuing to read each and everyday for at least 20 minutes.  

**Here's to a great new start to a new year!   Let's enjoy 2009!