March 19th-23rd

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Conferences are this week!  You should have received a conference confirmation slip letting you know what day and time your conference will be.  If you cannot make it to your conference time, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can reschedule.  Remember, your child will be the star of the first part of your conference so don't leave them at home!  Also, if you have any specific questions to ask me, please send them to me ahead of time so that I may have a chance to prepare the materials.

The new homework policy is in place!  Students must bring their homework packets back to school on Monday of every week.  If I do not receive their homework packet, they will be spending their earned time working on the goals that they should have been practicing at home.

This week in...

Phonics:  We are working on the dipthong /oi/  using "oi" and "oy".  We'll be practicing with the words:  soil, oil, broil, toy, moist,  joy, point, soy, boil,  and royal.  We will be sorting, building, and blending all kinds of words together!

Vocabulary:  Our new vocabulary words are gathered, agreed, randomly, jabbing, and signal.  We'll be learning what these words mean, how to use them in a sentence, and also building connections with the words.  We will be searching for these words in a play called Why Sun and Moon Live in the School.

Comprehension:  This week we will be emphasizing the ability to visualize what is going on in a story while you read.  When you visualize the story, it helps you to think about what is happening and it helps you to better understand the story.  We'll also be reviewing the problem and solution in a story.  

Grammar:  We will be talking about when to you I, me, we, and us.  We use "I" as the subject of a sentence and we use "me" as the predicate part of the sentence.  On the other hand, when we want to talk about ourselves and other people, we use "we" as the subject" and "us" as the predicate of a sentence.  We'll be doing some example sentences together to help us practice this skill.

Writing:  We are still working hard on our Sideways Stories!  Once students have finished brainstorming and planning, they will use that information to make a rough draft.  That rough draft is then turned into the check-me bucket and I will go through it and make suggestions to make the story better.  Then, students will have a sit-down writing conference with me to talk about their story and then use what we talk about to revise their rough draft.  Once they have revised their rough draft, they will use that to make a final draft.  When everyone has finished their final draft, we will combine all of our stories to make a class book called Sideways Stories from Room 10.  

Math:  This week, we are beginning to move out of our whole class lessons on using tools to solve word problems.  However, this does not meet that students who still need more practice using tools will no longer get the time to practice.  Students will practice their individual goals during goal time.  Tomorrow, we will be unpacking the following standard:

I can solve word problems with numbers within 100 using tens and ones.

In order to meet this standard, they must show me:

1.  They can understand what a word problem is asking them to do.

2.  They know if there will be more or less at the end of the story.

3.  They can write a number sentence to represent to problem.

4.  They can take apart, put together, and regroup tens and ones to solve a word problem.  

Students will have a menu of choices for ways they can practice this standard.  When they have shown me all four things above, they will have the opportunity to take an assessment to see if they can move on to the next standard.

Other News:

Today, we got to visit with our book buddies again!  We listened to some Shel Silverstein poems and then had a rhyme race where we raced to come up with as many rhyming words as we could think of!  Once we got our brains in the rhyming mood, we used them to create rhyming poems together!  It was a blast!

This week, students will be practicing the student led portion of their conferences.  They will be working very hard to impress you at their conference!

I look forward to meeting with all of you again this week!  I hope you all enjoy the beautiful sunshine and gorgeous weather we'll be having!