Great visit by author, Phil Bildner!

October 25, 2013

Hi,

What an exciting day! Learning about writing from Phil Bildner was amazing! He inspired us to put more details in our writing and to work hard to revise, then revise, then revise some more to get our writing to be the best it can be.

The Fire Safety Assembly for the last day of Red Ribbon Week was fun, also! We learned a lot about staying safe, crawling under smoke, and checking our smoke alarms. Congratulations to our essay contest winners! Liam, Jilian, and Matthew all won prizes in our school’s Red Ribbon Week Essay Contest! Yeah!

It was nice to see all of you at conferences. Thank you again for your flexibility.

Read about our week:

Reading: We read Twenty-One Elephants by Phil Bildner and made a story mountain to show the characters, setting, plot, climax, resolution, and theme of the book. New book club books were started and we read about an illness that is killing some bats in our country in our Time for Kids magazine. Next week we will read poetry and learn many poetic terms. We will also continue with our book club reading.

Writing: We took our first writing curriculum based assessment. The children had to practice writing to a personal narrative prompt with a two hour limit. They had to independently plan, draft, revise, edit, and write a final copy. They worked hard. The teachers will use a rubric to score the compositions and we will use the information to plan mini-lessons and make goals to improve writing. Next week we will continue working on writing expository essays and poetry.

Math: Patterns and Algebraic Reasoning has been our focus and the children are doing well looking for patterns and figuring our a rule or equation that supports the pattern. We will continue working with these concepts and will learn about elapsed time, measuring temperature, and bar graphs this week. Practice telling time with an analog clock. This is difficult for many students because there are more digital clocks around then analog, so the children get less practice. Thank you for continuing to work on automaticity of math facts as well.

Science: Our test on Matter was on Thursday. We will review this test on Monday and begin working with forms of energy.

Social Studies: We will continue to learn about the tribes of Texas.

Have a wonderful weekend! Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Pam Bartholomew