Newsletter April 7th - 11th/ 21st- 25th

Volunteer Schedule for April
 

 

In Reader's Workshop we used the week before vacation to work on a brief unit focused on Harder Decoding Strategies that are needed now that we are getting into tougher books with longer words. Some of the things we have learned to read include:

• long vowels vs. short vowels
• contractions and compound words
• word endings (-s, -ed, -es, -ing)
• antonyms/ synonyms
• sight words

This week in Reader's Workshop we will be looking at Fluency. Good Readers know that fluency helps their audience understand the story (mood, character, conversation) and it helps the reader understand the story (if children are having to work very hard to read and it is choppy then they're comprehension is negatively impacted).

Fluency is reading...

• smoothly (words are connected, they flow instead of 1 at a time)
• accurately
• with good pace (changing depending on the mood of the text)
• with expression (teacher voice!)

 
The list is always on my website:

April 7 - 11	New: every, most, again, does, quick Practice Review:  draw, very, please, pretty, yes Practice
April 21 - 25	New: once, over, rain, walk, house Practice Review: every, most, again, does, quick Practice
April 28 - May 2	New: by, may, just, work, after Practice Review:  once, over, rain, walk, house Practice

As always please visit the kidblog to see your child's work and give them some feedback! 

• The password is "2013/14". 

• Just be sure to sign your comments with who you are, you can just say _____'s Mom/ Dad, so the kids know who you are.

We used the week before break (and the amazing weather) to learn about Poetry in honor of National Poetry Month! There are many kinds of poems including acrostic, rhyming, and mood poetry and we will use our senses to try our hand at being real poets! We also learned about stanzas, rhymes, and patterns in poetry by examining poems written by others.
We are putting our acrostic poems on display in the hallway and creating a "Poet-tree" for additional poem space, starting with our shadow poetry.  

Moving ahead, in Writers' Workshop we will be working on "How-To" writing. This unit will help children learn to share directions to complete a task in an orderly way. 
Like all other expository writing we will learn "How-To" writing begins with an opening sentence, has details (steps), and ends with a closing sentence.

Unit 3: Counting and Place Value
We have learned to talk about, represent, and recognize numbers to 120. For numbers up to 100, we can draw or build them as tens and ones. We can compare numbers using words (less than, greater than, equal to) or symbols (<, >, =). We also learned to justify our answer by saying why. For example: 64 is greater than 46 because it has more tens.

 
We wrapped up this unit and took our post test before vacation. Some children ran out of time and will be given time to finish and then I will send them home for you to see what they have learned and what to still work on.

We are now onto Unit 4: Exploring Addition and Subtraction within 100
We will be combing all that we learned about addition and subtraction with the most recent learning about numbers as tens and ones (place value) to add bigger numbers all the way to 100. While we will use the term "regrouping", we do NOT teach children to "carry" a ten or to do equations without manipulatives. It is imperative that they learn what is happening when numbers are being exchanged by building and breaking tens and ones so memorizing the traditional method will NOT help them get a deep understanding of the process.

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