November 15th Update

Hi Parents,
Thanks for checking in today. We've had a great week, with lots of brain power being utilized over here in Room 315! We finished up our Reading Inventories, and I'll be meeting with each child over the next week to discuss a reading goal and behaviors to achieve that goal.  Check out what else we've been doing in class this week...

Phonics/Grammar: We studied our irregular past tense verbs and the spelling patterns associated with them. We played several rounds of SPARKLE to practice our words. We discussed how and why to use past tense verbs in our conversation and in our writing.

Reading: Our main focus this week was on strategies to help us understand nonfiction passages.  We practiced our "boxes and bullets" strategy with several articles (basically, an outline). We also learned how to preview comprehension questions and pick out key words to help us better answer short answer questions.  We read several chapters in the book, The One and Only Ivan. We completed a close reading on these chapters to expand our vocabulary and talk about unknown words and phrases.

Math:  We wrapped up our unit on multiplication and division strategies, practicing using the associative, commutative, and distributive properties to help us quickly solve equations. We reviewed multiplying by 10s.  We focused heavily this week on problem solving, particularly envisioning the problem so we can determine the correct operation. This continues to be our hardest concept yet and is one the students should be spending extra time on at home if you notice poor grades coming home in this area.  We also spent some time reviewing basic number sense skills after I noticed many students could not determine on their own if their LEXILE was 100 points or more than the last time they took the test.  I found it a bit surprising to find out how many students found this to be challenging.  Some great things for you to do at home would be to mentally ask your child to take 101 away from 400, then 99 away from 400... and so on.  It's important to understand the relationship between numbers and this is a great mental exercise. 

Social Studies:  We continued our study of all the native american tribes. 

Class Announcements...

Thank you to Mrs. Partin for being so on top of our holiday party!  Wow!  She already has it planned and organized. Please reach out to her and let her know if you are available to help.

Congratulations to Sethleigh, Sofia, Chase, K.J., Colin, and McKenzie for scoring 100+ points higher on the Reading Inventory.  This is an amazing accomplishment, since the expected growth in a year is 75-100 points.  Hard work pays off!  Keep up the reading at home.

Dinner Conversation Starters...
*Ask your child who Ivan is and what a character trait to describe him would be
*Ask your child to compare the Plains Native Americans to the Inuit Native Americans
*Ask your child what we learned about our words from the kindness video
*Ask your child to tell you three interesting details about the octopus...ones we learned from the passage we read