Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Weekly Update April 19-22

Hello!  I loved listening to our weekend shares this morning.  Everyone sounds like they had fun enjoying the warm weather.  Tomorrow we will be walking around the neighborhood to clean up trash to celebrate Earth Day.  Make sure that your child is wearing walking shoes J

Our end of the year field trip in First Grade includes a walk around Kaukuana with a few visits at local businesses.  It’s a great way to celebrate the end of our Communities unit.  We will be starting this unit next week. We will be needing chaperones for this day.  If you would like to add it to your calendar it will be Friday, May 20th.  Also, if you will need a background check done, please let me know as soon as possible! 

Upcoming Events:
April 20th-Earth Day Clean-Up
April 21 & 22: Brianna our Staff Developer from the Teachers College at Columbia University will be visiting our school and working closely with teachers and students.  We are excited for this learning experience!

Curriculum Updates:
Readers' Workshop: We are continuing our unit, Thinking and Talking About Books. We are focusing on making connections for a couple days this week. We will be noticing when we think “That reminds me of... because…” or “This makes me think of… because….” and using these as a conversation starters with our partners and as stop and jots in our books.  We will also make sure that our connections are not taking us too far away from the book, so that we can continue to carry the meaning of the story.  At the end of the week we will revisit the importance of our partners during reading time.  Partners can help us in many ways including solving tricky words.

Writers' Workshop: We will continue to work on writing series.  We will revise and celebrate the books in our first series this week.  We will then investigate what makes realistic fiction realistic.  We will use mentor texts to help us in our inquiry.  At the end of the week we will work on “show, not tell” by focusing on tiny realistic details so that the reader can picture the story in their mind. 

Word Study: We will spend the month of April reviewing 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: We will continue to practice 2-digit addition this week.  See the chart below to see the methods that we have been using in our classroom.  We will have the unit test on Thursday.  On Friday we will be doing more number-work with numbers up to 120. 

Social Studies: This week we will be finishing up our research on U.S. Symbols.  Students will share their findings with each other.  It really is exciting how much they are learning through their own investigations!  We will also learn about Earth Day and importance of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Have a great week!  As always, let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

-Samantha 

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