February 9-13

Happy Valentine's Day!  I hope you enjoy all the beautiful crafts your child brought home this week.   Many of the crafts will be available during choice time for the next few weeks for anyone who missed that day or wants to make more.  We will make Borax crystals in different colors later in the year.  Directions for making Borax crystals yourself are available online.    Thanks to Mary Jo for providing many of the supplies and to all the volunteers who helped out! I will post pictures of the festivities here soon. 

Please remember there is no school next week (February 16-20).  When we return we will begin learning about dinosaurs in preparation for our field trip to the Museum of the Earth on March 9.  In addition to learning science, specifically paleontology, one of the objectives of the field trip is to develop friendships between the schools as the students will eventually end up at the same middle school.  We will practice some conversation skills to help facilitate social interaction between the students, especially on the bus ride when students will be sitting with their buddies.

This week in writing we responded to letters from our field trip buddies at Northeast Elementary School!  We also worked on describing a specific event in great detail, by explaining each step we took to make a wheel and axle design in science using words like First, Next, Then and Last to organize our writing.  That piece of writing will be on display in the hall outside the classroom and you can see more examples of your child's writing during conferences in the first week of March.  If you have not already scheduled a conference time, you can do so below or I will contact you after the break.

This week in math we reviewed drawing a picture for a word problem, using "doubles" addition facts to solve similar problems (e.g. if 5+5=10 then 5+6=11), and using function machines more.  We also used tangrams and played some money games with $1, $5, $10, $50 and $100.  Please continue to help your child memorize the "doubles" addition facts from 0-10 and to challenge your child to work with two and three digit numbers at home, too! 

In reading we created a display of the reading strategies we have been learning and practicing at school.  The strategies are organized by what they help readers with: comprehension/understanding, accuracy/reading words correctly, fluency/reading smoothly, or expanding vocabulary/noticing, learning, and using new words.  

Recent "accuracy" strategies we have been learning include:

1. Skip an unknown word, read to the end of the sentence or page, then go back and reread so you can make a better guess about the unknown word.

2. Trying each sound a letter can make (hard/soft c and g, long/short a, e, i, o, u)

3. Looking for word parts (words within words like "end" in "blend" and blends like "bl")

When we read we also practice accuracy by sounding out all the letters in a word (not guessing after the 1st letter), using the pictures for clues, and thinking about what would make sense in the sentence/story.

 

We need tissues and ziploc bags (sandwich or quart size) for the classroom!
Thanks for your generosity.


We will study these sight words in the last week of February:
hear, mine, tell, were, time