ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:
I still need some of the Flat Stanley papers back! If you do not have a family member or friend willing to participate in the Flat Kid Exchange, please send the paper back indicating that and I will find an alternative person for your child to mail their flat self to.
Students were informed of our new biography research project! Students will be picking a person to research, writing a report about them, and then dressing up just like the person. Our official biography day will be on April 26th. Students will come to school dressed like their person and present their report. When it comes to dressing up like their person, it can be as simple as a hat. For example, if they choose George Washington, they can make a tricorn hat out of construction paper and wear that as their "costume". More details, information, and guidelines about this project will be going home next week!
Students have been doing a PHENOMENAL job bringing their homework back to school on Mondays! Thank you for all of the support at home you have been providing. It definitely makes a huge difference for your child here at school!
Thanks again to all of the parents who were able to fill out the Parent Parking Lot about spring conferences! Your feedback and comments were greatly appreciated and I will use them to make conferences better in the future!
This week in...
Phonics: Students have been introduced to silent letters. We have practiced /n/ gn, kn; /r/ wr; /m/ mb together. We looked at the following words together: knee, knife, knot, gnaw, sign, wrist, wren, thumb, lamb, and debt. We practiced reading, spelling, and spying the silent letters in each of these words. We then sorted them into categories based on their silent letter spelling pattern. It was definitely a tricky list this week!
Vocabulary: Our new vocabulary words are: blooming, prickly, muscles, aroma, scent, and trade. We will be using our elbow buddies to read these words, figure out what they mean, how to use them in a sentence, and also build connections to the words. We will then search for the words when we listen to the story City Garden by Roberto Salazar.
Comprehension: In small groups, we have been working on constantly checking ourselves for understanding. This means that we continually monitor ourselves when we read to see if it makes sense. If something does not make sense, we need to go back and reread. Sometimes we need to reread a sentence. Sometimes we need to reread the page. One of the best ways to check for understanding is to ask yourself questions about what you are reading! If you can answer the question, you can move on. If you can't, you need to go back and reread.
We will also be working on summarizing stories. When we summarize a story, we pull out the most important parts of a story and retell them in our own words. This helps us to remember the story better. Additionally, we will be working on identifying the sequence of events. We will look for key words like first, next, and last to help us with this.
Grammar: We will be working on pronoun-verb agreement. For example, a present-tense verb must agree with a pronoun in the the subject part of a sentence. We would say that "she wants to plant a garden" instead of "she want to plant a garden." We will be doing example sentences together and then students will have the chance to practice a few examples independently.
Writing: This week we will be focusing on finishing our Flat Kid Letters. We are writing short letters to the people we will be sending ourselves to! We will be reviewing the format of a friendly letter and also some of the things that you can write about in letters.
Math: Today we talked about our next learning target that we will be working on as a group. We will be practicing adding and subtracting 10 or 100 from a number in our heads. This a great review of the ones, tens, and hundreds place in a number! Students love the challenge of being able to figure things out in their heads too!
Social Sciences: With our Flat Kid Exchange we will have a chance to visit some of our mapping skills. Once we begin to receive our return letters, we will be able to map out where our Flat Kids visited and also calculate the number of miles we have traveled! This is definitely one very fun project and we are so excited to start mailing out ourselves next week!
Other News: Our biography projects are a combination of reading and writing. This week, students will be exploring all kinds of biography books in the classroom. At the end of the week, students will be choosing the person they wish to research.
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