Good evening everyone! Our week is off to a good start. Today we had our PBIS kick off assembly to remind kids that they earn something special every month by earning positive Dojo points throughout the building. Our class did a skit showing the school what good sportsmanship looks like. They did a great job! Book orders for October and picture day packets came home today with the students. We are working really hard on having each student know their reading level and picking good fit books. We are starting our reading groups later in the week and we are continuing to get into our Daily 5 routine. The PTO generously donated a wonderful rug for our classroom that the students can use during Daily 5. If you get a chance, please stop by to see it after school and let the PTO know that we all appreciate it! Thank you to all of the members!

Here is our week:

Spelling: This week we are looking at long and short /o/ sounds. Our words are poke, below, lock, broke, spoke, Dearborn, Michigan, lakes, location and symbols. We are working on proper nouns so please remind the students that Michigan and Dearborn are proper nouns and must be capitalized.

Math: We are finishing our studies on telling time and will be moving into reading and creating bar graphs.

Writing: We are starting a district writing prompt that will have the students writing a narrative about “a really bad storm.” It would be great if you could brainstorm and discuss some of the storms your child has been in and some of  the things that happened. We will start it tomorrow and it will be finished by the end of the week.

Social Studies: We are looking at the physical features of Michigan this week and on Friday we will have our second Michigan Made Friday. Mrs. Clough is donating the Michigan Made snack this week and we are looking for a volunteer to donate for next week. Please send me a Dojo or comment on here if I can schedule you for the donation next week.

Science: Students are looking at different types of forces. We will be spending some time investigating magnetic force and we will be having balloon rocket races later in the week to study how the amount of air in a balloon changes the amount of motion in the balloons.

Daily 5: Students are working on picking out good-fit books. If you would like to know how to pick a good-fit book, open any book to a random page and have your student read aloud. If there are 5 or more words they do not know or read incorrectly, the book is too hard for them. We are working on the students being able to do this by themselves because it is a very important skill. All of the students want to get to reading big chapter books but if the aren’t at that level, it will hinder their reading growth. Students need to be reading 20 minutes from their book bags every night. If you can ask some of the questions that are on the sheet in their book bag, you will be helping them increase their comprehension skills. We are also working on the strategy “Check for Understanding.” Students need to be able to tell you the “who” and the “what” on each page or they are not comprehending and need to back up and reread. I appreciate all of your hard work at home continuing on working on their reading levels.

We will be previewing the book fair in the lobby this week and the students will have a chance to buy on a different day.

Have a great week!