Our Monday morning began with Word Ladder sheets to build vocabulary and phonemic awareness.  We also reviewed some words from our Wonderful Words of the Day list from earlier in the year.  After meeting with our literacy groups, we began brainstorming ideas for our newspaper articles.  One of our end-of-the-year writing projects is creating a class newspaper.  We will be writing individual or partnered news articles about some of our favorite things from this year.  After recess, we worked on a Math Maintenance and began exploring polygons in geometry.  Do you know what makes a shape a polygon?  We used hands-on materials to draw our very own polygons.  It was interesting to compare these plane figures to the solid figures.  In religion, we had a very peaceful, still prayer experience.  We practiced the “Jesus” prayer together and also some quiet meditation.  Two books, Zen Shorts and The Three Questions, reinforced the concept of quiet reflection and relaxation.  After lunch, we copied our homework and read our SSR books.  In grammar, we began working with contractions.  These are fairly easy for us since we’ve had them in years prior.  Our new class read aloud is From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  It is a classic!  Our day ended with a super art class with Mrs. McQueen.