We have been cooking up a storm with apples and pumpkins. We think the apple store will be on Monday and Tuesday. The sixth grade class cooks apple treats and sells them for 50 cents or $1 to raise money. Please send some money in with your child on both days for this exciting treat! So far our class is the most enthused about applesauce bundt cake (with a few chocolate chips - we think that is the prizewinning ingredient). All our recipes are gluten free. Sometimes they come out really good and sometimes it's back to the drawing board.

We have been prepping a program called Words Their Way. It is almost set up and we began using it with the children this week. So far they seem to like it. There's a lot of cutting and gluing. Some groups are putting pictures into categories like clothes and food, while other groups are sorting by beginning sounds. Look in your child's folder for some of this work.

We have been doing a yoga class on Tuesday afternoons with Grace, the preschool teacher. She is teaching yoga to staff and to many classes at Shutesbury. Hooray for Grace!

We continue to learn sounds in Jolly Phonics. They will bring home their first two books next week. On each page there is a little box that shows the gesture for each sound. If you try it with your child I'm sure they'll be happy to show you how they make the gestures. We have begun reading groups and are looking at very repetitous stories for the beginning readers. We have more challenging books for the children who are already reading.

We are playing some games in math around counting. Today we began measuring objects using a stick that each child had made with cubes. Many children wanted to alter their stick to find out how many cubes long each item was. That will come later, for now we are looking at what is shorter and what is longer than ten cubes. One of the more interesting discussions in math right now is asking children if it matters whether the answer is the same or different when you repeatedly count the same group of objects. So far one child insists that it's OK if the answer is 10 the first time, 8 the second time and 7 the third time. Another child insists that the answer should be the same each time. Many children are inbetween, thinking sometimes it needs to come out with the "right" answer and other times it doesn't really matter. We will continue this discussion for a long time.

Lisa and I are planning to get out the camera more often next week. We need pictures for our blog. I'll try to include some soon.Thanks for your patience!