text: School Pictures for LIW are on Tuesday. Recess/PE/etc. will resume as normal on this day. Students may change after pictures if desired.
  A Self-Defense Class for kids and adults, sponsored by the LIW PTO, is coming to De Smet on Sunday, September 23rd. For more information, click this link.
  The next LIW PTO Meeting is on Tuesday, September 18th at 7:00 PM at the De Smet Event & Wellness Center. Like their Facebook page!
  Blast Off & Learn
  We finished another great week of 5th grade! I am really enjoying my time with all of these sweet kids! They have really shown me how hard they are willing to work and I appreciate that so much! This year will be so great if they can keep that up!
  This week in Reading, we read the book, Frindle by Andrew Clements. It was a quick read, but the students seemed to really enjoy the book. I like starting the year off with this book as it's an easy one to comprehend and one that the students usually seem to like. We worked on answering discussion questions, as well as creating a Frindle Dictionary together with all of the vocabulary words from this book.
  In Math this week, we continued working on finding factors and multiples of given numbers, but also moved forward into multiplication of double digit numbers. Our curriculum encourages us to use different strategies while multiplying and dividing. We will get to the algorithms (or "old fashioned ways") later in the school year, but right now I am encouraging the students to use the methods and strategies that we work on in the classroom. There is a video tutorial below that I have created to help them with their homework, or if you want to watch it to better familiarize yourself with the two multiplication strategies we're working on right now. These are great strategies that really help us understand the values of each digit in the problems. The students will have a deeper number sense by learning multiple strategies!
  Multiplication Strategies | Educreations
  I am sure by now that your child has talked about our student teacher, Miss Shelby Thompson. She is a DSU student and is with us on a year-long student teaching placement. She will begin to take over more responsibility in teaching the class very soon, however, we work together to plan the lessons. If you have any questions, please let me know. She is a wonderful addition to our classroom and I am excited to have her with us this year! The kids really like her already!