Weekly Update-February 22-25

Hello,

We are almost at the end of February already! We will be scheduling portfolio conferences soon, so if you haven't returned your conference scheduling form, please do so as soon as possible. Also, permission slips were sent home for an upcoming field trip to the PAC please remember to send them back.  Thanks!

Upcoming Events:

Thursday, February 25th-11:30 Dismissal

Friday, February 26th-No School

Monday, February 29th-Melodies and Masterpieces Family Night-5:30-7:00-Night includes a short concert put on by New Directions' students. 

Friday, March 11th-Author Breakfast

Monday, March 21st and Tuesday, March 22nd-Portfolio Conferences. Confirmation forms with scheduled times will come home Friday, March 4th.

Wednesday March 23th-Monday March 28th-Spring Break

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: This week we are continuing our "Going on Reading Adventures" unit. We will be studying the characters in our books closely. Without characters, we wouldn't have a story. Readers meet characters and study their relationships, learning all they can about their likes and dislikes, their wants, and paying attention to what they do and say to infer feelings and motivations. We'll learn how readers can reread in order to learn even more about the character, noticing new details to help them understand the character in new ways. Readers will work on fluency by reading in a way that reflects how the character is feeling. We'll learn how when you read, you don't only get to know about a character, you almost become that character. You read, pretending to be the character and you show it with your voice. When books take you on reading adventures, you don't just follow the character, you practically become the character. You can change your voice to show what the character is feeling and bring the character to life.  

Writers' Workshop: We'll be finishing up our small moments, making our writing readable, unit this week. We'll be using a checklist to make sure our writing is readable (capitals, end marks, word wall words, and spaces). 

Word Study: No new words this week! This would be a good week for review, as we've had some tricky words the past few weeks:

rain, who, after, house, out, what, where, new, teacher, school, down, zoo, when, because, some 

Math Workshop: We will be finishing up Unit 5, "Place Value Situations." We continue to work on the make-a-ten strategy in class using facts with teen totals. This week we will be using reasoning to solve problems, practicing numbers to 120 and taking our end of unit assessment.

Science/Social Studies: We finished up our solids centers. This week we will be exploring two new solids using all we have learned about the properties of solids so far.

Have a great week! 

-Samantha