November 5th-9th

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Homework packets are due TOMORROW!

October reading calendars are due!  Send them back to school ASAP!

If you haven't already sent the name and address of a friend or relative who is willing to participate in our Flat Stanley project, please send it to me by WEDNESDAY!  We would love to start getting our letters going.  Our goal is to have our flat selves and letters ready to mail by the end of next week!

Thank you so much to all of you who were able to help us with our Harvest Party last week!  We had a blast!  We wouldn't have been able to do it without you!

Classroom wishlist: 3M masking tape and, if anyone happens to have one, a mailbox (a girl can dream right!).  I'm hoping to set up a mailing system in our classroom to help Team Blowey practice letter writing throughout the year.

This week in...

Phonics:  We're practicing the long /a/ sound with the spelling patterns "ai" and "ay".  Our words for the week are:  main, wait, sail, tail, train, jay, pay, stay, hay, and may.

Vocabulary:  Our new words are:  serious, broken, personal, informs, and heal.  We will figure out what these words mean and build connections to them.  Then we will search for them in two short stories called A Ride to Help and  Time for an X-Ray. 

Comprehension:  We will continue our work with summarizing and identifying the sequence of events.  When we summarize, we only retell the most important information in the story.  When we are looking for the order of events in a story, we are looking out for key words like first, next, then, and last, to show us when events happened.  Below is a video that talks about some of the words that help us with identifying the order of events in a story.  Check it out!

Writing:  We are continuing to work on writing friendly letters and identifying the parts of a friendly letter.

Grammar:  We'll be working with proper nouns.  Proper nouns are days of the week, months, and holidays.  We'll work together to find these things and make sure they always start with a capital letter.

Daily 5:  Beginning this week, we are starting campfire reading groups.  Team Blowey is divided into four teams.  Each team is assigned a book to read and respond to.  Then, later in the week, each team will meet with me to go over the book.  This is a time for me to enforce the comprehension and accuracy strategies that we are working on.  When we meet, students gather around the campfire and we'll read with flashlights.  Then, we'll start some campfire conversation by talking about the book they we've been reading this week. 

Math:  This week, we are ending our work with fractions and will begin to move into odd and even.  Here is the standard that we will be unpacking:

MA.02.OAT.03.01

Determine whether a group of objects (up to 20) has an odd or even number of members.  Write an equation to express an even number as a sum of two equal addends.

We'll also be pretesting to see exactly what students will need in order to meet this standard.

Social Science:  We have been talking a lot about elections lately.  We know that this a big year for our country and that a lot of adults will be making their voice heard tomorrow by voting for who they think will help our country the most.  In order to help us understand this a little more, we've been listening to our own candidates for classroom president by reading these books:

Tomorrow, students will be filling out their voter registration card and heading to the voting booths to cast their vote for who they would like for president:  Duck, Grace, or me!  Later this week, we'll be working on a writing activity where the students will write about what they would do if they became President.  

If you have any questions, please let me know!  I hope you have a fabulous week!