Hello!
I hope that your week is off to a great start! It's so hard to believe that we are already in our second week of the 4th quarter! As a school we have decided to implement some more options for nightly reading homework for the 4th quarter. Today a list of reading and writing options will be coming home and students will be able to make a literacy choice nightly or at least 3 times a week. I still plan to have kids pack books to bring home each night as they are always an option. Our school goal is to create meaningful home literacy experiences for all kids. If you have any further questions about this please feel free to email me or write a note in the planner.
Upcoming Events:
Wednesday, April 6: Dress Up Day
Thursday, April 7: Mix Up/Backwards Day
Friday, April 8th: Dress like a Cat of KAT
question/answer, Knowledge-A-Thon
Tuesday, April 12th: Family Night-Science, Social
Studies and Subs 5:30-7:00
Monday, April 18th-No School-In-service for teachers
Curriculum Updates:
Readers' Workshop: This week we've started our new
unit, Thinking and Talking About Books. We will begin the unit with
retelling. Students will become aware of
the elements of the story, particularly character, setting, and plot which will
help them to have other kinds of talks about books. We will learn that readers don’t just have
thoughts after they read a book but while they read the book. We will use
post-its to mark important parts and character change. We will work on having meaningful
conversations with our partners as a way to hold themselves accountable for
comprehension. Below is a checklist that
we are using to check if we are including everything that we need in a great
retell. You might use this same
checklist after retelling books that you are reading at home!
Writers' Workshop: We started our realistic fiction
unit this week. This is an exciting unit for students because they get to
do a lot of pretending! Students will
come up with characters of their own, naming and putting them into imagined
scenarios. This week we will introduce that characters face trouble and that when
characters get out of trouble writers give readers a satisfying ending. We will also spend some time working on
spelling and adding “sparkle words” to our writing to help bring our stories to
life. We will end the week by looking at
the Narrative Checklist to see what we are doing well as narrative writers and
set goals for what we want to work on next.
Math Workshop: We've just begun our new unit, 2-digit
addition. We are taking some time this
week to explore two digit numbers closely.
We are doing a lot of work with the 120 grid, before and after, and 10
more and 10 less. Getting to know these numbers
really well will help students as we move forward in this unit. Towards the end of the week we will introduce
the adding 2-digit numbers through picture drawings.
Science/Social Studies: We are continuing our study
of US Symbols. Each day that we have social studies we are choosing a new
symbol to study closely. They are becoming
experts on each of these symbols…be sure to ask them about what they are
learning. It is a topic that they love
chatting about! We’ll be sharing some of our learning during our Family Night
next week.
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’ll also be using the patterns
and parts from these words to help us spell new words.
As always, let me know if you have any questions.
Samantha
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