November 2nd-6th News

It sure doesn’t feel like November….warm recesses are always a plus though! We are getting excited for our field trip on Friday to The Building for Kids.  We will be attending a Weather class while we are there that fits in nicely with the beginning our new science unit. 

New Directions is participating in the KHS National Honor Society Food Drive from Oct 26-Nov 6. Please consider donating if you haven't already.

Upcoming Events:

Tues. November 10th and Thurs. November 12th-Portfolio Conferences

Monday November 16th-Half Day-11: 30 Dismissal

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: We will be finishing up our Word Detective unit by being word detectives in nonfiction books. We'll be using clues to help us figure out tricky words and what they mean. We'll continue using our strategies of, "Does it look right? Does it make sense? Does it sound right?" when trying to figure out tricky words. We'll also be sharing our new learning from our nonfiction books with our partners. 

Writers' Workshop: As we finish up our How-To writing, we'll be starting our Nonfiction Chapter Books unit. Writers will be bringing home the How-To books they have written over the past two weeks. In our new unit students will be writing information teaching books. In the beginning they will be writing a basic information book similar to a picture book. By the end of the unit they will be creating multiple information chapter books filled with elaboration, interesting text elements and pictures that supplement the teaching of the words. This week we will find a topic we know a lot about, plan our topic across our fingers, and keep readers in mind when writing.

Word Study: We introduced 5 new word wall words today. The words are: look, make, but, give, all. We will be assessing these words on Friday. These are words we want students to be able to read and write automatically without having to think to sound them out.

Math Workshop: We will be starting a new unit, Unknown Numbers in Addition and Subtraction. This week we will be focusing on solving problems with unknown addition partners. For example, We see 9 fish. Five are big. The others are small. How many fish are small?  We will be exploring multiple strategies for solving these problems.

Science/Social Studies:  Students were very excited to create posters sharing their research bats and spiders.  Hopefully they shared them with you at home. This week we will be starting our weather unit. We'll be spending the week building background, including a weather class at the Building for Kids on Friday.

Have a great week and as always if you have any questions please let me know!  

-Samantha