Newsletter Nov. 19-25

Thanksgiving Break 11/28-11/31
Don't forget that Wednesday 11/27 is an early release day so please plan accordingly. 
* Children will NOT have lunch at school on those days so it will be important to send them a healthy, satisfying snack that will keep them running until they get home/ after school care.

Don't forget if you are looking for another opportunity to come into the classroom, you can sign up anytime- there are LOTS of volunteer openings available! I would LOVE to have a parent to run a games station in the afternoon during math!
Volunteer Schedule for November

 

In Reader's Workshop we're continuing our unit on comprehension (thinking about and understanding reading). Here's what we've learned so far!
Good Readers...

* Think about the beginning, middle, and end of a story
* Retell beginning, middle, and end with a partner
* Think about characters and setting
* Use a sticky to mark an interesting character and tell a friend about it
* Use a sticky to mark an interesting detail or part and tell a friend about it (a funny part, a sad part, a part that reminds me of..., etc.)

Don't let your little reader forget those strategies we learned about in our last unit. Please continue to encourage them to use picture clues, beginning sounds, ending sounds, word families/ familiar chunks (such as -at, -in, etc.), skip and return, and most importantly... think! Ask "what makes sense" and cross check it with the words first and last sounds.

We are continuing to learn to add some variety to our stories to s-t-r-e-t-c-h them out and tell more. This week we added to our Brilliant Beginnings and Mighty Middles (Brilliant Beginnings can start with sound effects, questions, character descriptions, setting descriptions, etc. Mighty Middles tell what happened first, next, then, after, etc. They include details that describe our observations using our 5 senses. "I could hear", "I felt", "I could smell", etc. ). We learned to make our endings better by telling how we knew the topic was over before telling how we felt and by adding what made us feel the way we did. For example, instead of just saying "I was happy." we might say "When it was bedtime we cleaned up and got in our pjs. I was happy to have had a friend over to play." Now instead of good endings we are working on Excellent Endings!

In Math Workshop, we continue to talk about fact families, addition, and subtraction. After taking a quiz last week, I quickly realized that the kids needed a little more time to practice that skill and so we have slowed down and are revisiting comparison and word problems in which the children need to determine what to do to solve the problem (addition or subtraction) before being able to solve it. The IXL homework was equally difficult for them, but also important. Please look at some of the examples from the IXL F6 to get an idea of the types of questions your child should be practicing.