April 8-11

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Homework packets are due tomorrow!

The team jerseys are not quite complete yet.  My hope is to send them home at the end of the week.  Thank you so much to all of you who were able to donate extra shirts and paints for us to use!  

Tomorrow is literacy night!  The event required pre-registration so I'm hoping that all of you who wanted to attend will be able to be there!  Mrs. Sylvester and I will be running a non-fiction reading center about animals!

There will be no school on Friday, April 12th!

IXL:  please refer to previous post.

Classroom Wishlist:  Markers!

This week in...

Phonics:  We are working with the schwa sound!  Our words are:  alone, ago, again, alike, comma, idea, awake, agree, above, and away.  

Vocabulary:  Our words are vast, oceans, areas, voyage, and planet.  We'll figure out what these words mean and build connections to them.  Then, we'll search for them in two short stories, Continents and Oceans, and Record Holders!

 Comprehension:  This week our focus will be on identifying the main idea in a story.  This means that we will find what the story is mostly able and then support it with details.  We'll do this while we read Columbus Explores New Lands.  We'll also ask the questions:  What was Columbus looking for when he set sail across the Atlantic Ocean?  What did he find?

Writing:  This week, we'll begin writing poems.  We'll start with acrostic poems.  An acrostic poem is a poem where you pick a word you want to write about and each of the letters becomes the beginning letter for each line in the poem.  For example:

S:  shines brightly

U:  up in the sky

N:  nice and warm on my skin

Grammar:  We'll be working with possessive pronouns.  A possessive pronoun takes the place of a possessive noun.  Some examples are:  my, his, and her.

Read Aloud:  Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar

Math:  We'll continue to work on solving word problems using tens and ones but I will also introduce solving word problems with unknown change.  Here is an example:

Sally baked 74 cookies for the bake sale this weekend.  On Saturday, she sold a ton of cookies!  When the bake sale was over, Sally had 23 cookies left.  How many cookies did Sally sell at the bake sale?

Here are the steps to solving this problem:

1.  Understand what the word problem is asking you to do (find out how many cookies Sally sold... she started with 74 and ended with 23, the numbers got smaller so I need to subtract)

2.  Will there be more or less at the end of the story (She started with 74 and at the end, Sally only had 23 cookies, so there was less at the end of the story)

3.  Write a number sentence to represent the problem (74-___ = 23)

Once I have my number sentence, I can solve it in many ways.

First, some kids use the relationship between addition and subtraction.  For example, I know that 7 + 3 = 10, so 10- 3 must be 7!  So to solve this problem I might try solving 23 + ___ = 74,  or 74-23= ___

Students can use many of the tools they already know as well like the 100s chart, the number line, or drawings of base ten blocks.

Student may also choose to use manipulatives, like snap cubes to find out how many they need to take away to only have 23 left.

Unknown change problems are simply like finding the missing number.  They could be 25 + ___ = 52 or  ______ - 21 = 45.

Science:  We are in our final observations for our brassica plants.  Now that our plants beginning to die, we will be able to see how the plant life cycle can continue!  Some of our plants have grown seedpods so we'll talk about how that happened and why!