Newsletter Week #3

Hello,

Your children are wonderful and we had a short but very productive week.

Reading-We discussed ways to monitor our comprehension as we read and fix-up strategies when we notice that we aren't quite understanding. We started some book club groups and practiced monitoring our comprehension while we read independently.
We also practiced leaving tracks of our thinking while we read magazine articles about Girls' Education and UNICEF, Saving Tigers, Cherokee Languages, and Testing. We talked in small groups and realized that when we are engaged and talking about our reading we understand and remember more. We read some non-fiction books on Thursday and Friday and noticed text features (photos, charts, captions, index, table of contents, glossary, maps, diagrams, etc...)and discussed their purposes in helping us understand the text. Listening to our inner conversation as we read helped us to notice when we learned something new. The children were so engaged and excited about the non-fiction books that they read. It was exciting to watch them.

Writing-In writing workshop, we have a mini-lesson, we all write while individual students conference with the teacher, and then we share our writing. We practiced ways to come up with ideas for our prewriting. (make a list of ideas, decide which one has lots of details that you can remember, then sketch out the story and begin writing)The class has been doing a wonderful job in our writer's workshop and have written many entries this week. They wrote a personal narrative entry about a special person, place, and item. Then we discussed ways to revise our entries by adding more details, zooming in to tell the most important parts of the story, and using descriptive language (similes, metaphors, sensory words, onomatopeia, alliteration, and lots of strong adjectives and adverbs). I love to read their writing.

Math-Place Value has been our focus. We have examined and worked with numbers up to 999,999,999. We have played games and solved problems finding the digit in a certain place value spot, comparing and ordering larger numbers and added and subtracted using large numbers in context. We enjoy sharing our strategies on the overhead and learning from each other. Our first math assessment was taken today and most of us did very well. We will be working with some computation strategies this week and continue with problem solving.

Science-Our plant/liquid experiment has been going well so far. All of the plants are growing but the plant that is being fed Dr. Pepper is a little bit taller than the others. We have been measuring them and feeding them each day. We have also been recording the data in our science notebooks. We also examined and sorted some shells and learned about different types of shells. A game called "Did you know..." was played to review the safety, science processes, and tools information for our assessment which wee took this afternoon. Next week we will be working on some Social Studies.

On Tuesday, we will be watching a taping of President Obama's address to school children. The live showing is during our lunch. Let me know if you don't want your child to watch the broadcast.

Reminder-Wednesday is an Early Release Day. Students will be released at 12:45.

Thank you for signing your child's reading log. The logs are due on Mondays with at least 100 hours read and a parent signature.

It was nice to see so many grandparents in school today. Come back anytime!

Have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for sharing your child with me. Let me know if you have an questions or concerns.