Newsletter March 24th- April 4th

Volunteer Schedule for April
 

 

In Reader's Workshop we finished characters and connections and moved on to a brief unit 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

 
The list is always on my website:

March 31 - April 4	New: draw, very, please, pretty, yes Practice
April 6 - 10	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

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 are going to take a brief break now that we've concluded a unit on "argument" (persuasive) writing and word choice. We won't forget that a persuasive paragraph is much like a nonfiction paragraph and has 5 sentences:
opening
3+ reasons
closing

We will be learning about poetry this week 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!

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 will be wrapping up this unit and taking our post test before the end of the week.

Science focus: