January 7-10

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Welcome back to school!  I hope everyone is settling back into school routines nicely.  What a crazy way to start 2014... with three snow days in a row!  I hope everyone was able to stay warm and safe. I know I, for one, was excited to get back to school and start trekking through the second half of the year! 

Here is a reminder of our specials schedule in case anyone needs it!

Monday:  P.E.
Tuesday:  Music
Wednesday:  Art
Thursday:  Spanish
Friday:  Library

Please remember to send your child to school with gear for outdoor recess!  They should have their snow pants, jackets, hats, gloves, and boots everyday!

Please send in a healthy snack everyday!  This helps us stay focused and energized in the afternoon!  Remember... please keep all peanut, strawberry, and pineapple snacks for home!  Thanks for helping us keep our students healthy and safe!

Students are invited to keep water bottles on their desk to stay hydrated throughout the day.  Water only in the water bottles please!  Juices can make quite a sticky mess in the classroom so please keep all juice as a lunch drink or an at-home drink.

We will be inviting Mrs. Thibodeau into our classroom this week.  She'll be talking to Team Blowey about making healthy choices at school and at home.

This Friday, Lynn Ploude (Maine children's book author) will be coming to Russell School! 

Holiday Homework Packets are due on Thursday!  New homework packets will also go home on that day.

This week in...

Phonics:  We will be working with the long e sound with the spelling patterns e, ee, ea, ey, and y.  Here are the words we will be working with:  eat, leaf, mean, queen, need, seek, baby, pony, he, and we.

Vocabulary:  Our new words are attached, breathe, delicious, frantically, gasped, and swung.  We will define these words and build connections to them.  Then, we'll search for them in the short story called The Story of the Giant Carrot by Rosa Manuel.

Comprehension:  We will begin talking about cause and effect.  The effect is what happened and the cause is why something happened.  For example, the cause might be that it rained.  The effect would be that you used an umbrella.  Really, when thinking about cause and effect we should flip them and say effect and cause.  Then, we would be able think about it like ___________ happened because ______________.  We'll talk about this complex skill while reading Head, Body, Legs by Won-Ldy Paye and Margaret H. Lippert.

Grammar:  We will be working with action verbs.  An action verb is a word that tells what someone or something is doing.  Some action verbs tell about actions that are hard to see.

Writing:  This week, we will begin our new focus on persuasive writing.  Students will be writing to persuade someone to think how they think, feel what they feel, and want what they want.  We'll set the purpose for writing and then we'll have some time to think about some of the reasons why someone might tell us no so that we can address them with specific details in our writing.  Our writing will follow this basic format:  opinion, three reasons, and opinion restated.  Students will be challenged to also edit their own writing for capitalization and punctuation.  

Math:  This week, we will be focusing on three year-long standards:  money, time, and math facts.  Students will be reviewing the topics we have already learned and then practicing these standards to make them stick.  Our focus for money this week is to review all of the coins and their values.  We'll also review adding coins together.  Our focus for time will be reviewing the hands of the clock and reading time to the nearest hour and half hour.  As for math facts, students will continue to work on math facts at their own pace.  However, now that we are almost halfway through the year, students will be encouraged to check in on their math fact families more often.  When you are practicing at home, remember they are not just working to get the answer correct, but they are also working to get the answer from memory... and quickly!  Practice, practice, practice!  Personally, I think flashcards are the best way to review math facts.

Social Studies:  This week, we are really focused on re-energizing our classroom vision and our SOPs.  We want to make sure they are staying alive and are truly working for us.  This morning,  Team Blowey worked to revamp our SOPs so that they are meaningful and helpful for us.  We also sang our classroom vision and talked about our four power words:  teamwork, respect, fun, and creative.  We make these things come true when we follow our code of cooperation.  Our code of cooperation spells out the word, "BEST".  So we say that we are being our BEST selves.  Today, Team Blowey created a book illustrating how they will be their BEST self at school.  They wrote about these four things:  be in control of my body and my words, everyone has to do their part, stay focused and never give up, and treat others the way you want to be treated.  

Going along with the new year, Team Blowey also made some New Year's Resolutions!  We made a flap book to show the year 2014 and wrote four resolutions for ourselves, two about school and two about home.  Some resolutions were things like, "I will memorize all of my math facts by the end of the year" or "I will get better at reading and start reading chapter books!".

Scholastic News:  Team Blowey will now be encouraged to work through the Scholastic News issue independently each week.  This week, students will be reading about penguins!  The common core skill that we will be focusing on is being able to use details from the text to answer the 5 W's and an H questions.  They will also practice using an image (in this case a map) to gather more information about the text.  

Read Aloud:  We are beginning our Mystery Genre unit!  Today students brainstormed word that are associated with the mystery genre such as clues, detective, suspect, and crime.  Tomorrow, we'll do some thinking about what detectives are, what detectives can do, and what detectives need.  Then, we'll begin our mystery case files while we read The Snowy Day Mystery by David Adler.  We'll use our case files to make predictions, gather evidence (clues!) about the crime and the suspects, and write down our thoughts on how the mystery was solved.