Weekly News March 29-April 1

We are looking forward to welcoming back the students from spring break!  We cannot believe that this week marks the beginning of the fourth quarter!  This year has flown by so far but we will continue to pack lots of learning into this last chunk of the school year.  It was great meeting with you last week to discuss your child's progress.  As always, feel free to contact us if you have any follow-up or new questions!

Upcoming Dates:
March 31: Jump Rope for Heart
April 4: Sports Day--to celebrate opening day for the Brewers
Stay tuned for more dress-up days April 5-8th for KAT Week
April 8: Knowledge-a-thon
April 12: Family Night
April 18: No School for students
April 20: Earth Day

Reading:  As we continue reading our non-fiction texts, we will focus on how readings sometimes read everything they can about one topic.  Instead of reading a book about pigs, a book about sharks, a book about money, etc, we will start to look for texts that teach about the same topics and notice what is the same and different in the texts.  Students will learn the sometimes the pictures and the words teach similar information and sometimes the pictures and words teach two or more different things all on the same page.

Writing: Students are busy writing books on subjects they are experts on and are eager to share their passion and all that they know about a topic. They were given a Tiny Topics notebook which is a big hit with them. They are always on the lookout for good things to write about, and they can use these notebooks to jot down ideas they come across to use later.They are adding Table of Contents and rereading their books to make sure the information they taught in each page matches what they planned to teach their audience. They will be using mentor texts to notice things like boldface type, diagrams, and how-to pages that they might want to use in their own books.

Math:  This week we will continue to model and decompose teen numbers as a group of ten ones and extra ones,  and practice adding and subtracting within 10. We will also match pictures to numbers, compare groups, and identify the number that is more or less. Students will identify and describe three-dimensional shapes and describe shapes in relative positions(next to, under, above, behind, etc...) We will wrap up our week with our Unit 4 Test on Friday.   

Social Studies:  Students will work in a variety of All About Me centers this week.  Some of this work includes creating a self time-line, writing all about themselves on an app (similar to this website), creating a collage, and exploring many books.

Word Work:  With the multiple short weeks we will spend the remainder of this week focused on the same sight words: red, yellow, blue, then, was.  If you are feeling really ambitious, have your child write their sight words (use the list of all of the words so far!) and put them inside plastic eggs to have a sight word egg hunt.