Nov. 9, 2018 Update...

Hi Parents,

Thank you for  visiting today! We have had an awesome week, filled with lots and lots of learning.  This week, we also enjoyed our Thanksgiving Feast. Thank you to all the guests who attended. Check out below for an update on our academics...

Phonics/Grammar:  We continued our study of verbs, focusing on verbs that end in -y.  We also worked on past, present, and future tense forms of the words.  We reviewed capitalization rules with an emphasis on titles of books and poems.

Reading:  We began our new class novel, The One and Only Ivan.  We made journals for our novel study and wrote a fully developed paragraph about the setting of the story. We also looked closely at challenging words and phrases, then used context clues to determine the meaning.  We worked with a partner on Friday to practice orally reading a selection from this book.  In addition to our novel study, we also learned about the five text structures that authors use to organize their information in nonfiction books and articles. We learned about the signal words to look for that will help identify the text structure. We used an organizer to record the main idea and details.  We did some amazing main idea and supporting details work with the informational articles this week.  We also had plenty of independent reading time to get lost in our own chapter book selections!

Math:  In math, we began our unit on area.  We learned the important connection between multiplication and finding area.  We began by looking at our classroom carpet and calculating the area by counting tiles, and then finding that we can use a formula to do the same thing. We talked about how area is written using "square" units because there are actually that many squares that can fit in the given shape.  We reviewed using the distributive property to multiply larger numbers (magic squares).  We also went back to our first unit on rounding and had a great math discussion to make sure we are retaining this skill.

Writing:  We began looking at the various ways we can organize our information in our chapter books that we are writing.  We used what we learned in reading about nonfiction text structure to decide on an organizational format.  We categorized our facts and details so we can decide on what chapters we want to include in our books.

Dinner Conversation Starters...

*Ask your child about the Apollo 11 space mission.  What do some people believe about the moon walk?  What is your opinion?
*Ask your child what informational book they are writing in class.  What are the chapter headings going to be?
*Discuss why authors use a certain text structure when writing their books.
*Ask your child who Ivan is.  Ask your child what it meant when Stella said "Zoos are humans' way of making amends".

Class News and Announcements...

Thank you to everyone who bought our class a book fair book!   The kids are already enjoying these new reads!

Mid-quarter academic alerts will come home next week. If you do not receive an alert, your child is meeting or progressing towards all Quarter Two standards.  I will send an email copy of our current standards next week so you can see what we have and will be covering.

Please make sure you are continuing to emphasize nightly reading of at least thirty minutes. I know this time of year can get hectic, but reading is so important at this critical age.