This is an old picture from step up day. They have grown so much! We have had a great short, but first week back. We are pleased with the new classroom arrangement, which allows for small group reading as well as more movement and flexible seating during the day. Here's our start to the new year: We continue to build our understanding of language mechanics through the mentor sentence program. This past week, students worked on sorting winter words that were either nouns or adjectives. Because students are growing this parts of speech foundation, I can give them very specific feedback on the mechanics of their own writing. And then, by partnering this work with our "Would You Rather" project, a series of short writing tasks, I hope that students will gain a deeper understanding of what makes great writing. We tried out our first question this week: Would you rather only have heat or only have air conditioning? In this weather, you can imagine that many stu