Newsletter- Week 5

  

Skill for the week
short e sound- 
get*, ten*, bed*, lips into, me, my

After the spelling test on Friday, we add these words to the word wall and students are expected to spell them correctly when writing.  

This week, a great question was asked about the level of help you give your child during homework.  With spelling, it is important that your child is practicing the words correctly, so that is probably the only place I'll ask you to make sure you help them if they are misspelling words (although, the words are spelled correctly on the list, so that may be a place to start when assisting).  With the rest of the homework, I would love them to use their word attack strategies (the are learning them this month and I'll send home that information soon).  We have a writing motto, which is "Good writers do their very best and move on!".  

Vocabulary study this week will be 

absence

accept

accident

account

could

course

height

opinion

paid

special

Last week, we learned that if we read something we don't understand, we reread it. This is a great skill to learn early, because like I told the kids, calling words isn't reading... THINKING about what you're reading is just as important as getting the words right.  Reader's Workshop is really a lot about teaching students to THINK about reading.  We have some great questions we ask ourselves before, during, and after reading that help with comprehension.  I will also attach these questions so that you can talk with your kids about the books they read.  Students are often working with reading partners and are learning more everyday about how to talk about books with other students.  This week, we will begin the "Junior Great Books" program with ALL students in our class (thanks to our TAMU interns for helping with this HUGE undertaking).  

Our writers are learning several new ways to develop writing skills.  They have learned how to discuss writing plans with their writing partner, as well as add voice to their characters, first with speech bubbles, then adding dialogue to their actual writing.  So many of our writers are already doing that, but it seems to be coming very naturally to them.  This week, we will be selecting a piece of writing to start revising (re visiting to see if we can make it even better), then editing (using fix up strategies to make sure it's readable for our audience) and soon, we will have a writer's celebration, where we will get to hear our pieces read aloud by our writing partners.  The writing will then go out in the hall, so that the entire school can admire all of our hard work!

As we close our study of collecting, sorting and graphing data, we will be doing numerous culminating activities to check for understanding.  Our kids have really taken to these skills, so I feel like we will be ready to move into our next topics a little earlier than expected.  In addition, as a child who struggled with math (and algebra), I am a firm believer of starting to expose students to algebraic strategies as soon as possible.  We will start story problems like "There were 10 apples on the tree.  Some fell off.  The next day, there were 7 apples on the tree.  How many fell off?" to which we would set the problem up as "10 - some apples = 7".  Since "some apples" is hard to write over and over, we will call them 'x'.  So, 10 - x = 7, and we will discuss different ways of figuring out what 'x' really is.  I hope this is clear... it is AMAZING how quickly kids get this and it lays a fabulous foundation for years to come (as I struggle with a 7th grader on this exact thing almost nightly, wishing his 1st grade teacher had done this:)

We have briefly discussed the scientific process, but are moving on to the human body and it's systems.   We will talk bones, muscles, blood, and guts for the next 2 weeks, so be ready for some interesting facts to be coming home! (We'll try to keep the gross to a minimum, but kids learn so much better when things are presented in a creative manor.... by the way, peeled grapes feel just like eye balls.... or so I've been told).

**Social Studies is taking a week off to allow us to get the entire human body in, but the contributions of Johnny Appleseed are right around the corner!**

I can't stress enough how smoothly our year is going.  In fact, I have a very non-threatening discipline plan that I have been meaning to introduce, but here, starting week 5, we haven't come even close to needing it, so I think I'll hold off until I see a need.  Our THREE interns (Kellie Parr, Alyssa Gonzales, and Lauren Kahre) have transitioned into our classroom setting very well.  I know I always love when my kids have student teachers in their room, because the only thing better than one energetic teacher is TWO energetic teachers!  The kids have benefited greatly from the extra sets of hands and will continue to until the end of November!  Lucky us!  

Just a friendly reminder, students need to wear athletic shoes everyday for safe PE participation.  Also , it's helpful if girls can wear shorts under their skirts to avoid any embarrassing situations.  Thanks for all that you do to support our classroom and our kiddos.