What a wonderful and crazy week back at school! I loved hearing about all the fun over the Thanksgiving break and the different traditions that took place! I hope you all enjoyed the book fair this week! I sent home a scholastic order form if you were unable to attend the fair at school. Feel free to fill out the order form online of bring the form back to school and I will submit it.
We have many activities coming up this month! Please feel free to start sending in different candies, icings, and other decorating tools to help us create and decorate our own Gingerbread houses on December 18th! Please feel free to come in and help with this project as well as I’m sure it will be messy and fun! I will send an email later on with specific times! Writing: This week we learned about the different parts of a sentence such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs. We learned that a noun is a person, place or thing, an adjective describes something, and a verb is something that you do-an action! Using this information, we created fun, silly sentences such as “I poked a fluffy hippo!” We then transferred our new skills to create a beginning to a new story! Reading: We switched out our books this week and really looked at non-fiction books and how we can learn from reading them. Together we talked about key words in a non-fiction book and how they help us understand what we are reading about. We visited our 3rd grade-reading buddies who were also studying non-fiction books! They helped our class use the strategies we have been studying to learn new words and learn from our books. We even earned a reward for reading so well together! Math: In math we continued to find new ways to make 10 when solving different number sentences. Each student has become a mathematician as they found all the ways to make 10 with different numbers. Students were then put to the test to show what they knew by completing our mid-module assessment. Everyone persevered through the assessment and demonstrated the skills and strategies we have been learning in class. Social Studies: We wrapped up our Families unit this week by talking about how our families are special and unique. It was so humbling to hear all the things each student loved about their family. We then talked about how important family is. Our class really enjoyed sharing different traditions and stories about our families! Next week we have conferences. As a reminder, there will be no school for students on December 5th and 6th for conferences. I look forward to seeing you all there and showing all the progress your child has made! Have a relaxing weekend! Our class had a wonderful time at our Veteran’s Day Assembly honoring all the veterans who work had to protect our country. Thank you to those who have served and who came to celebrate with us!
Writing: This week in writing we finished our first unit of Narrative writing. We completed the unit by writing one small moment story beginning to end using all the information we have learned since the beginning of school! It was exciting to travel to the park, birthday parties, and aquariums through our class’ stories! At the end of the week, we celebrated our hard work by having a fun writing party! Reading: Our class continued reading non-fiction books this week and learned how to read the books with emphasis. Together we practiced reading books like robots, word by word, then reread them to smooth out our words, and finally reread the book again adding emphasis to key words. By the end of the week our class was reading like teachers do when reading a story out loud! We continued reading non-fiction books with emphasis by reading out loud to our partners. Math: During math this week we have been taking number apart to make addition easier when adding a number to 9. Since we already know that 9 needs 1 more to make 10, we borrow 1 from the lesser number, add it to the 9, and then solve our new +10 number sentence. Many students are getting strong with this concept and are starting to make a connection to other problems! Next week we will continue building this strategy and adding to it. Social Studies: We have continued learning about families, family traditions, where our family came from, and much, much more! Many students loved sharing the book they created about their family. It was so fun to hear about the special traditions, unique foods, and fun vacations everyone has gone on. To end the week, some students shared their family interview and talked about where their family members originated. After listening to the interviews, we colored their families origin on a map. By the end of the day, we had many different places colored in! We talked about how we probably have many other origins but we will have to talk to more family members to find out! This week flew by so quickly! Remember that next week we have our Finger Food Feast on Wednesday, November 21st. There will be no school on Thursday or Friday next week for the Thanksgiving break! The Monday we come back from Thanksgiving we will be going to the book fair! Many students are excited to look at the books and possibly purchase some for winter break reading! Another great week of learning took place this week! We practiced singing Grand Old Flag for our assembly honoring our veteran’s and made fun hats to show our patriotism! I sent home a Family History Interview in your child’s purple folder. Please help them interview an adult family member and bring it back to school whenever it is finished! This interview is optional but is a fun way for your child to get to know their family history!
Writing: This week we focused on using mentor texts to enhance our writing. We used POP OUT words, ellipses, details from our pictures, and motion in our writing to make it more fun to read. After studying our author texts, we took all that we have learned to start revising one piece of writing. We looked at our conventions, spelling, details, and many more things to publish our writing. It is amazing to see the progress each student has made in their writing! Reading: Our class continued looking at Non-fiction texts and how to use them to learn new information. Together we learned that you can stop and study a page to learn all more information about the topic. For example, in our book Hang on Monkey!, we stopped and looked at a page of monkeys to learn more. Looking at the page, we learned that the monkeys live in the rainforest, like to sit in trees, and are orange. We then guessed what the next page might say and talked with our reading partners to learn more. Our class has loved looking at non-fiction books! Math: This week in math we started Module 2 of our math curriculum! Students are beginning to solve harder addition problems and will transition to harder subtraction problems! Many students were able to take the skills and strategies from module 1 and apply them to the new problems. We started the new module by using different strategies to solve addition sentences that had three numbers. Most students noticed that we can make groups of 10 in the numbers sentence to make it easier to solve. We will continue building this strategy next week! Social Studies: During social studies we continued learning about diverse families by talking about the different foods and traditions in each family. Many students talked about different holidays and the special meals that go with each holiday. Other students talked about going on family vacations each year as their traditions. It was so fun to hear about all the quality family time that each student gets! As a reminder, the book fair will begin on November 26th after we come back from the holiday break! Thank you to all the volunteers who helped make our Orange and Black party special! The class had so much fun creating the ghosts, solving riddles, and making silly pumpkins! I am so excited to share more fun memories with this amazing group of kids!
Writing: This week we wrote about what we were excited to do on Halloween! Many students wrote about getting candy, visiting a haunted house, and trick or treating with friends. Everyone was really motivated to write about Halloween and we learned that we should have the same enthusiasm each time we write. Together we talked about choosing stories we are really excited to write about and throwing out the ones that we do not care for. We called this process Cleaning House! Some students realized that some of their stories were not that exciting and wanted to put their focus on the stories that they really cared about. Reading: During reading we continued building our partner reading skills. Students read with the partners and tried to help them read difficult words, use the pictures to help with tricky words, and encouraged each other to keep reading more books. We also talked about how partners help each other by not telling them the tricky word. It was so humbling to see each classmate encouraging their partner! Math: In math we started building on our knowledge of +0, +1, and doubles math problems to help us solve subtraction problems. We started the week by finding what one less of numbers one through ten are and then putting it into a subtraction sentence; for example one less than 9 is 8 so our subtraction sentence is 9-1=8. We continued to practice this with greater numbers until we got to five less than a number! Students were all impressed with their knowledge of subtraction problems! We finished the week by looking at different subtraction problems and solving them. Social Studies: We began our first social studies unit: Families! Students were so excited to share different things about their family such as special foods, special family members, and favorite traditions. We then looked at different kinds of families such as adoptive families, foster families, step-families, and many more. After looking at many different families, we all decided that families come in different shapes and sizes but they are still a family! Soon students will be getting a book to take home and create about their family! Don’t forget to send in a picture of your family to hang up in our classroom! Thank you again for all of your continued support! |