Weekly News 2-12-21

 Weekly News 2-12-21

Important Notes:

*Happy Vacation Week!  Lexia is available all week for any kiddos looking for something to do who are working on their weekly goal and want to keep the momentum going.  They are working so hard in the program and it is showing in their improved reading skills!

Our Work this Week:

*In spelling we reviewed the words from the last five units.  This provides additional practice for anyone who needs a bit more time to master the patterns, while also doing some enrichment work with proofreading, labeling sentence types and using the words in context.  After the break we kick off long vowel work with  long a patterns.  Students are moving along in grammar work and are gaining understanding of parts of speech, use of commas in a list, end punctuation, words with multiple meanings, prefixes and suffixes and subject/verb agreement.  

*During math we practiced our subtraction strategies, learned to use 10 as a friendly number, did lots of problem solving and completed the unit 3 test.  We fit in review work with time, money and addition facts daily.  After break we will kick off unit 4, on place value and measurement. 

*In reading workshop we continued to read biographies and also studied The Lunar New Year in our Scholastic News.  Students are motivated to record new learnings and questions in their reader’s notebooks.  They are also enjoying sketching and labeling diagrams of things they have learned while reading. Every time we read nonfiction together we practice identifying the nonfiction text features (headings, table of contents, bold words, captions, labels).

*Writing workshop and Science were tied together this week. We did final drawings and observations of our plant experiments (although we decided to keep our radishes growing because we love watching them).  Then we shifted gears to our new science unit on force and motion.  We did four investigations to learn the content about force and motion.  We focused on push and pull, gravity and friction and also built some initial knowledge about simple machines.  This will help us with our experiments after vacation. We also did a Mystery Science exploration on force and made our own “Hopper Poppers” to test out how to impact direction of an object through force.  

*Music was our special all week and the kids had such a blast learning about and playing new instruments.  They studied the Lunar New Year and played music representative of that holiday. One day I found  them playing a beautiful melody, all together, as a class with Mrs. Joray and they sounded incredible!  Ask your child about what they learned in music this week.  

Testing out her "hopper popper" in science

Decorating the hopper popper with a hopping animal illustration

It took real perseverance to get the hopper popper positioned just right!

Valentine making.......

There were a lot of steps to get the hopper popper ready.

We did our final grassheads drawings. (Sideways - sorry!) 

Kids had fun with a valentine activity packet rather than the usual morning work!

Creating the valentine holder is half the fun!

Our grassheads came out so well!

We read about Lunar New Year and recorded what we learned.

This gong was exciting!

Lots of time with instruments in music

The kids loved having music 5 days in a row!

We sorted pushes and pulls from real life.