November 26th-November 30th

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Homework is due tomorrow!  Please remember to send it back to school with your child!  Also, if you have any feedback, please write it down on the packet.  All of your feedback has been so helpful!

Thank you so much to all of the parents who have been so generous!  Our classroom recently got a bunch a new goodies!  We received:

-index cards so we could make flashcards to practice our math facts

-new play-doh to help us practice our spelling words

-not one but TWO beautiful mailboxes to help us set up a mailing system so we can continue writing friendly letters (one mailbox will be used for Team Blowey mail, the other mail box will be used for mail going to outside classrooms)

Please remember to send in a healthy snack for your child every day!  We eat snack in the afternoon to help us keep our brains energized!

The weather has cooled down quite a bit so please send your child to school with their jackets, hats, and mittens.  

This week in...

Phonics:  We are practicing the long /o/ sound with the following spelling patterns:  o, ow, oe, and oa.  We sounded out, spelled, and sorted these words:  told, most, grow, mow, crow, toe, goes, toast, soap, and foam.

Vocabulary:  Our new vocabulary words are:  imaginary, uniform, practices, starting, tryouts, and coach.  After talking them out with partners, we'll search for them in the story called Brian Gets Fit on the Field by Emily Goldman.

Comprehension:  Our focus for this week will be to generate questions and to make inferences.  When we generate questions, we're asking ourselves questions as we read to help us understand the characters, the story problem, and what might happen next.  When we are making inferences, we really have to make our brains work hard!  We have to take what we already know and what we've read to figure out the parts that the author didn't necessarily tell us in the story.  We'll be practicing these skills while reading There's Nothing Like Baseball by Angela Johnson.

Writing:  This week, we'll be writing an explanation.  Student's will need to include personal feelings, lots of details, and reasons to help their audience understand the writer's opinion or experience.  We'll make sure to use precise words to make the writing clear, we'll organize our ideas and give good reasons to back up our opinions, and we'll make sure we vary the types of sentences we use to make our writing more interesting.

Grammar:  We'll continue our practice with possessive nouns.  Whenever we want to show possession, we need to add an apostrophe and an s.  Sometimes we get tricked, though, and add an apostrophe to any words that end in s!  

Math:  We're continuing to work with odd and even numbers and being able to prove why a number is either even or odd.  We're also working with rectangular arrays.  When we're working with arrays, we're adding up how many same-sized squares are in an array by using a repeated number addition equation.  This will provide us with the foundation for multiplication.  Arrays give students the concept that they can add the same number over and over again.

Social Science:  This week our read alouds are focusing on weather.  While we're reading, we'll be adding weather words to our anchor charts to help us become more familiar with them as we dig deeper into the world of weather. 

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and I hope you have a fabulous week!