Week 5

                                           Week 5 News

Dear Families,

      You are rocking the home learning days and I’m grateful for the amazing ways you are pulling this off and also proud of these kids for showing this responsibility.  Thank you for your commitment to help them continue to learn, practice and grow when they are not at school with me.  As you may have read in Mr. Libby’s newsletter, we will keep track of packet work and online learning data to show that students participated on those days, and therefore are marked “present” rather than “absent.”  Let me know if you need flexibility with the timing and I can adjust attendance when work is sent in or completed. 

Wednesdays

While we are still working at school all day on Wednesdays, I have fewer professional development trainings and meetings now and have some time to add in virtual meetings.  I would like to do a virtual class meeting for any student who would like to join.  This is optional and a social opportunity for the whole class to see each other at once!  The meeting will be at 9:30 on Wednesdays.  Students will be able to access the link straight from the Brightspace page - under User Links.  It says, “Google Meeting with Mrs. Pols.”  They click that link and then click “join.” I will teach them how to do this and practice it in class.  

  Curriculum

*In math we worked on place value concepts.  We practiced comparing numbers, naming digits in ones and tens places, trading sets of tens, reading and writing numbers with numerals and also with base 10 block drawings.  We also solved word problems and worked on adding/subtracting 10 efficiently, did name collection boxes and skip counted.

*In our second week of grammar/language review we worked on short and long vowels, nouns, prepositions, spelling patterns, punctuation, subject/verb agreement, counting syllables and more.  The kids are participating enthusiastically in this work.

*During reading workshop we continued to identify story elements in fiction.  Students worked on story maps after I read a book to them. They mapped out the characters, setting, problem and solution.  This week I also taught them how to use RAZ kids to access a variety of books at their reading level, to listen, read and do a comprehension quiz on each book.  This is a great tool to use for home days when they don’t have access to our classroom library.  We also explored EPIC, which offers a huge selection of books.

*Writing workshop was full of time spent learning to strengthen our small moment stories.  We read Jabari Jumps, as a great model of how to stretch a story out slowly and effectively across a lot of pages.  We learned that making our characters talk and move, think and feel, can really bring the story to life.  With smaller groups I am having lots of time to conference with each child about their writing, and work on their individual goals with them. 

*Our Scholastic News focused on what community workers do to support us all.  We also finished our Mystery Science unit on Light and Sound.  

Working on place value problems!

Playing the Number Grid Game

Playing the Exchange Game!