March 18-22

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Conferences are this week!  You AND your child will come into the classroom at your scheduled time for the student-led part of the conference and then head over to my table for the teacher-led part of the conference.  If you need a reminder of when your conference is scheduled, please let me know!  If there happens to be a snow day tomorrow, any conferences scheduled will be re-scheduled to the following Tuesday at the same time.  If there any any scheduling conflicts please let me know!

We are going to Hannaford for our healthy choices field trip this Friday!  Please remember to send back a permission slip for your child ASAP.  There will be a second notice in your child's backpack today if I have not received it from you yet!

Homework packets are due tomorrow!

It is still very chilly outside!  Please remember to send your child to school with all of their outdoor gear!  We also have a lot of students coming in wet and muddy so we ask that you please send an extra pair of clothes with them to school, just in case they need them.  The nurse's office does not have a supply big enough to accommodate everyone.

We're still collecting Hop-A-Thon money!  Send in your donations!  The highest fundraising class gets to go to the Special Olympics and cheer on our GNG athletes!

IXL:  Please refer to previous posts to see what to practice on IXL

This week in...

Phonics:  We're working with the variant vowel /o/ with the spelling pattern au and aw.  Here are our words:  pause, draw, launch, law, fault, jaw, fawn, hawk, raw, and crawl.  We'll sound out, spell, and sort each of the these words.

Vocabulary:  Our new words are noble:  promised, gleamed, wiggled, beloved, and glanced.  We'll figure out what these words mean and build connections to them.  Then, we'll search for them in the story My Home in Alaska.  

Comprehension:  We'll be working on making inferences.  An inference is when we use our schema and the evidence from the book, to make a decision about the book.  We'll practice this skill while reading Nutik, the Wolf Pup by Jean Craighead George

Writing:  We're still working on gathering and organizing our research for our biographies.  Students will be looking for when the person was born and died, what they were most famous for, three important events from their life, and a fact that they find really interesting.

Grammar:  We'll be working with contractions.  Contractions are short forms of two words.  For example, can't or didn't.  An apostrophe replaces the letters that are left out when the two words are connected.  We'll be joining words like are not and is not to make aren't and isn't.

Math:  We'll be continuing to work on solving word problems with tools like the 100 chart, number line, and drawings.  Many students are able to use these tools but the challenge is to be able to show their thinking!  My hope is that we'll be starting to introduce the next strategy for solving word problems this week as well.  The next strategy is using tens and ones.  See the example below:

Joe has 34 stickers.  Zoe has 25 stickers.  How many stickers do they have all together?

    If you are solving this word problem with tens and ones, you need to go through the steps on your check list.

Step 1:  Is this problem asking you to add or subtract?  (add)
Step 2:  Will you have more or less at the end of the story?  (more)
Step 3:  What is the number sentence that represents this problem?  (34+25=_ )
Step 4:  Use tens and ones to solve the problem.

First thing you do is take out the tens from each number and then add them together.

30 + 20 = ____  (I got 30 from 34 and 20 from 25)  The sum is 50.

Then, you take out the ones and add them together.

4 + 5 = ____ (I got 4 from 34, and 5 from 25)  The sum is 9.

Then you add the sum of the tens to the sum of the ones.

50 + 9 = 59.

Your answer is 59 stickers.

Science:  Our plant observations continue as we watch our brassica seeds grow!  Our focus is still on being able to use science words and write about only what we see!

Conferences:  Today, students have been hard at work preparing for their student-led part of the conference!  They are very excited to show you how much they have progressed and also very excited to show you some of their work!

Technology:  Students have been heading down to work on the computers to practice their typing skills.  Recently, your child practiced their typing skills and made a word cloud!  Our typing practice will continue this week as well!

Book Buddies:  We will have book buddies this week!  Since it is the first day of spring, we'll be reading a spring time story and help our buddies make some spring time crowns!

Weather:  It is Team Blowey's job to update the weather board that is in the cafeteria for the first graders and kindergarteners to check out.  The board will tell them the season, what kind of weather it is today, the temperature, whether it is indoor or outdoor recess, and also what kinds of clothes they will need to wear. 

I think that's all!  If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!  Have a wonderful week!