11/27-12/1

Week of 11/27-12/1

Hello Families!

I hope you all had a wonderful break. It has been so great being back with the students. We have started many new units this week! In Fundations, students are learning how to read and spell words with the schwa sound. This is when a vowel makes an unexpected sound, such as the e in travel. The e sounds like a short u. The students are working on using their resources, Student Notebooks and dictionaries, to help discover the correct spellings of some of these words.

In math, students have been working on finding elapsed time, measuring with grams, kilograms, liters, and milliliters. They are working on solving word problems involving all four operations: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. They took their Mid-Module Assessment and did a really great job. We will be focusing on rounding and solving word problems using the four operations in the upcoming weeks before Winter Break.

Students have started new books during Reading Groups. One group is reading I Survived the Battle of Gettysburg. The students in this group all have different jobs to direct the discussion like the Word Wizard, Summarizer, and Discussion Director. Another book group is reading Gooney Bird Greene. In this group, students are discovering character traits through inferencing and using a sticky note method. Another book group is diving deeper into their thematic unit about the Cheyenne tribe!

In writing, students have started their work on personal narratives. They are working on writing about a “small moment” in their lives. We will be working on using descriptive language, dialogue, and transition words. Students are also working on paragraph structure during morning meeting. They have been unscrambling jumbled up paragraphs, identifying the topic sentence, details, and concluding sentence.

During theme time, we are studying various Native American Tribes. Students are broken up into four different tribes: The Nez Perce, Iroquois, Cheyenne, and Pueblos. Students are studying their tribe’s location, food, shelter, clothing, and other fun facts. They are using top down webs and presenting their work on iPads!

Here are some things to remember!

• Reading Logs are due on Fridays even if they are not completed. Students earn coins for the books they read at home! Students can bring books home from our classroom library.

• Please practice multiplication facts at home so students can say the product within 3 seconds! Students can play through the games I handed out at conferences or flashcards. If you need other suggestions to practice, please let me know! Students should be fluent in their facts 2 through 5.

• Checkout our classroom website! You can find it on the Academy webpage underneath my name. There are a lot of pictures on the website of activities we have completed in the class. There are also websites we use in class that you can use at home!

I hope you all have a great weekend!

Miss Plympton