Parents any time any of these items are sent home please look at them, go over them with your child, sign them so I know you have seen them, and then send them back to school. I’m hearing from the students that these items are lost, little children have gotten a hold of them, or it has been thrown out. Please show your child how to be responsible and help them return these items to school in a timely manner.

Curriculum Update

Science

We are beginning our unit on “Light”. We will be dealing with: shadows, natural light, man made light, things you can see through (transparent), things you can sort of see through (translucent), and things you can not see through (opaque).

Social Studies

We are beginning the Unit entitled “What is a Family?” They will be talking about themselves (Past, Present, Future). They will be talking about their family’s culture. (religion, food, language, dress, and traditions). We will be talking about jobs at home and at school. Finally comparing their family to other families to show the diversity in our community.

Math

We are more than half way through module 1. They have completed a mid module assessment, and now they are working more with subtraction problems and story problems with the unknown being in the original total or one of the parts. For instance the number sentence could be: 10 -6 = (?), or 10- (?) = 7, or (?) – 5 = 5. They are starting to use number lines (number paths) to help them add or subtract. They are also starting to answer the question in the story problem in words (a statement). For instance: How many pencils does Sam have left? Sam has 6 pencils left. Many students are having a hard time with this. they know the answer, but to explain it it more difficult.

Writing

Students are finishing their 2nd personal narrative writing piece. This time they wrote about “A time the were scared”. We are working on getting more details and feeling into their stories, writing neatly across the page, and capitals and punctuation when needed. There as always a range of writing abilities at this time of the year, so not everyone is working on all these skills. They all, though, are pretty good at sticking to the topic, and not go off onto to another story.

*To mix spelling and writing, every other week, they are completing dictation sentences that contain their spelling words. I say a sentence twice and they write it down on nice handwriting paper. I’m checking for handwriting, spacing, spelling, capitals at the beginning, and punctuation at the end.

Reading

For reading, I see the students 1 on 1 ( I choose an unknown book (cold read), they go over the pictures, and then they show me how they can read this book. I try to meet with everyone at least every other week or more depending on their needs.), with a reading group (where we read and work on strategies, discuss, and do a quick write about the story), or as a whole group when reading the Treasures book, Scholastic News, trade books I’ve read aloud to them , or the chapter book I read to them after lunch each day. We do a little more in depth discussions during whole group.