Our marvelous Monday started with our Wonderful Word of the Day:  disaster.  We made some excellent sentences using this word.  After introducing our new spelling chapter, we worked on spelling activities.  Using a short play in our reading textbook helped us learn more about this week’s vocabulary words.  We also started reading Nate the Great:  San Francisco Detective.  It’s exciting exploring the genre of mystery.  In handwriting, we practiced our undercurve letters and began working with downcurves.  The lowercase “a” is an easy one!  In phonics, we spent some time reviewing the long a sound, which correlates with our spelling words this week.  Lucas was freed from the chair in Class Clown.  We were surprised that Cricket stood up for him in class.  After recess, we began writing our “How I’ve Helped Out” paragraphs.  This reinforces our weekly theme of helping others, as well as, our new topic in religion:  The Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit fills our hearts when we do something kind or nice for others.  We took notes about the Holy Spirit and also listened to the Pentecost reading from the Bible.  It marks the birthday of the church.  In math, we took our math maintenance and continued working with making change.  This topic is such an important one in the real world.  It’s key that we understand it thoroughly.  We also talked about the strategy of looking back and checking our work in math.  After lunch, we had our Crazy Hats Day assembly.  Everyone’s hats were fantastic!  SSR followed and so did art class.