March 31-April 4

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Tomorrow is Biography Day!  Please send your child to school dressed as the famous person they have studied.  Remember, costumes should be simple and should not require any trips to the store!  If you are having trouble thinking of what to wear, please let me know and I will be more than happy to help you with ideas!  I did meet with some members of Team Blowey to help them with some ideas.

Homework packets are due on THURSDAY!  Please remind your child to put them in their backpack on Wednesday evening.  Also, remind your child to check off the ways they are practicing at home each week.  It is a way to communicate all of your efforts at home to me.

THIS WEEK IN...

Phonics:  We are working with the variant vowel sound with the spelling patterns /au/ and /aw/.  Here are our focus words:  pause, launch, fault, jaw, draw, fawn, hawk, law, raw, and crawl.

Vocabulary:  Our new words are:  noble, promised, gleamed, wiggled, beloved, and glanced.  We will define these words and build relationships to them.  Then, we will search for them in the short story called My Home in Alaska.  

Comprehension:  We will be focusing on making inferences again!  When we make inferences we take what we know and what we have read to make a decision about the story.  For example, if I read that a character in the story walked into the room with a raincoat and rain boots, I could INFER that it was raining outside.  We will practice this skill while we read Nutik, the Wolf Pup by Jean Craighead George.

Writing:  After we finish presentation our biography posters, we will shift our writing focus from research reports to poetry!  In honor of poetry month, we will be diving into the wonderful world of poetry, reading it and writing some of our own.  We will be working to create our very own poetry playlist books including an "About the Author" page.  This week's playlist will include a "List Poem" and an "I am" poem.  

Grammar:  We will review contractions!  A contraction is a short form of two words.  We use an apostrophe to replace letters that have been left out.  For example, we can change do not to "don't".  The apsostrophe takes the place of the letter "o".

Math:  Students will continue in their flexible groups for word problems with a focus on adding and subtracting fluently within 100 using strategies.  To find out exactly what every member of Team Blowey is working towards, please refer to last week' blog post.  There you will find a checklist for our power standard as well as our extension standards.  

Speaking and Listening:  This week, we will really get our first chance to show the rest of our teammates one of our speaking and listening standards.  Students will be presenting facts about the famous person they have been studying for the past few weeks.  Team Blowey will be practicing having a speaker's voice (loud enough and clear enough for others to hear), eye contact with the audience, as well as giving clear and true facts about the person they have studied.