Weekly Update April 25-29

Hello,
This week brings the last week of April. I can't believe how quickly the year is going.   We have been very busy!  Today we did a reading and math test on the ipads that the district is piloting for next school year.  The students all worked hard and were very patient during it!  Next week we will be doing our PALS testing.

Upcoming Events:

Friday, April 29: Yoga-wear comfy clothes
May 12: Family Night
May 20: Community Walking Tour Field Trip

May 26: Early Dismissal 

May 27-May 30: No School

May 31: Mini Courses

June 1: Field Day

June 2: Last day of school for students. Early Dismissal

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: We are starting a new unit, "Reading Nonfiction Cover to Cover: Nonfiction Book Clubs. In this unit we will focus on growing nonfiction reading skills, as well as work on our speaking and listening skills. As we read longer books, we'll need strategies for hanging on to the important information. We'll also learn to take the information provided in one book and add it to information learned in another, and another, thinking and learning about a topic across many texts. This week we will be focusing on reading with an explaining voice, and using and explaining voice when talking with our partners about our books. We will also notice the different ways nonfiction books are organized and think about how it will teach us. We'll spend some time determining what's important by looking for words and phrases that repeat.

Writers' Workshop: We will continue to work on writing series.  This week we will be working no showing realistic settings by remembering places we have been that are similar to places in our stories, including chapters in our stories, using everything we know about fiction writing to help us set goals, and using patterns like one of our favorite author's Cynthia Rylant to help us elaborate.

Word Study: We will continue to work on using all of our words from this year. Our goal is to not only write them isolation, but also spell them correctly in our writing. We have also been adding many new poems to our poem binders!

Math Workshop: This week we will be starting our new unit, Geometry, Measurement and Equal Shares. In this unit we will be telling and writing time to the hour and half hour, learning about the attributes of squares, rectangles, triangles and circles, partition circles and rectangles into two or four equal shares, compose 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional shapes, compare and order objects by length and measure objects with same-size length units.

Social Studies: We finished up our US Symbol study on Friday, by presenting what we learned to the rest of the class. Mrs. Welhouse finished up our Junior Achievement program yesterday. This week we will be starting our study of communities and families in communities.