Thanks for visiting today! Can you believe we are actually getting into the holiday season? The first quarter of school literally FLEW by. I enjoyed meeting with everyone last week. That will be our only official parent-teacher conference, but I am always available to meet to discuss your child. Check out what we did this week...
Reading: We read several informational articles, "Rosa Parks" and "Lions vs. Tigers". We practiced identifying the main idea of each paragraph within the passage and we created our Boxes and Bullets outline to help us retain the most important information. We also met in small group to work on the skill of inferring; using text evidence to form an observation that is not explicitly stated. We worked together with our book club buddies and discussed the books.
Writing: We talked about what authors of nonfiction books do before writing. We discussed ideas for our informational chapter books and made a list of topics we consider ourselves experts on. We went to the media center and had a lesson with Mrs. Cochran on researching topics using the Cobb Digital Library.
Math: We learned how the distributive property of multiplication can help us solve problems. We practiced multiplying one-digit by two and three-digit numbers. We reviewed all the strategies we've learned for multiplication and division so far and took an assessment. We also took our 2nd timed math facts quiz. I still see a lot of counting on fingers going on. Memorization means you instantly know the answer. We are starting easy; 2s, 5s and 10s.
Science: We learned about the types of soil; clay, sand, silt, humus, and loam. We also read about the layers of soil; topsoil, subsoil, and bedrock. We read in our textbooks and created our own individual anchor charts with the most important information about Soil.
Class News and Announcements...
A great resource for finding books on your child's level is lexile.com. It is a website where you can put in your child's lexile range and narrow your search by interests. I encourage you to make sure your child is reading at or slightly below his/her reading level. If your child is wanting to read books that he/she could read in 1st grade, that increase in reading ability won't happen. On the other hand, you also don't want your child to be at the level of frustration when independently reading. My rule of thumb is to put in a range of 50 points below your child's lexile to 25 points above.
Thank you to Mrs. Newlin and Mrs. Nadeau for helping our class with the Pumpkin Contest activity. Keeping in mind the book, The White Giraffe, the kids worked in small groups to pick a game reserve animal and paint a small pumpkin. The display of our work is in the media center and is adorable. Come check it out!
Our field trip to New Echota is next Friday. We do not have room for parents on the bus, but would love for you to follow us and enjoy this day with our class. Parents will have to pay for their own admission at the entrance.
No comments:
Post a Comment