Weekly News! 4-2-21

 Weekly News 4-2-21

Important Notes:

*Next week students can choose new library books on Monday!

*Run Club forms are in student take home folders if you are interested.  Students in the “Early” arrival group will just stay with me until 2:55 dismissal and then join Mr. Hutchings for Run Club.  

*Report cards are in student take home folders.  THeir portfolios are in their backpacks in a blue file folder and do not need to be returned. 

Our Work this Week:

*In spelling we reviewed words from the last 5 units of vowel teams and c,k,ck words. Next week we get to work on beginning consonant blends. We are working more with possessive nouns in the grammar program.  Don’t be surprised if you suddenly see apostrophes showing up everywhere in your child’s writing. They often over generalize this rule at the beginning of this instruction.  

*During math we practiced open number lines as a way to solve word problems. We also learned to record temperatures on a thermometer and solved problems about temperature changes with start/change diagrams.  We completed the Unit 5 test on Thursday and then started Unit 6, Whole Number Operations and Number Stories. We kicked it off with data collection and made picture graphs and bar graphs.

*In reading workshop we switched gears to work on forming opinions about books and characters.  This takes some practice!  Students often want to tell you what happened rather than offering their opinion.  So we did lots of practicing with lots of different books and lots of opinion forming!  We also compared opinions to facts. More of this next week!

*Writing workshop.  As we continued to work on opinion writing, we learned to write our first book recommendation letter, in which we tried to persuade someone to read a book we loved.  To begin we used Mercy Watson to the Rescue - a book we enjoyed reading together.  We learned how to have an opening sentence that includes the book title.  Next we learned how to add 3 reasons and then a conclusion.  We are doing lots of pre-writing organization in this genre to get ourselves organized to write.  We are also learning to use transition words.  Our second book recommendation letter was about Kevin Henkes’s book, Lily and the Purple Plastic Purse. It is helpful right now for us to work on the same book together, so we can share opinions and our reasons.

*Art was our special this week and we did a lot of painting projects and learned to blend paint.  We brought our project home Friday.

Proud artist!

We made a bar graph with class data!

We also made a picture graph.

After we each counted how many pockets we had on, we put our data in this tally chart.

We are really growing in the area of making change!

We used an organizer to get our thoughts ready and then wrote a clear book recommendation letter!

This really helped us keep track of our thinking before we wrote.

We also wrote a letter about Mercy Watson to the Rescue!

In math we worked with temperature changes.

After reading about Mae Jemison, we recorded our opinions about her.  

WE also recorded opinions about Mercy Watson!

This week we finished the fourth (and final) book in the Cat Pack series.  The kids fell in love with this series (as I did years ago) and were really sad to see it end.  They have been riveted by the cats adventures!

We are becoming open number line experts!