Weekly News April 4-8

For the 4th quarter, we are trying out a new school-wide reading/writing calendar for homework.  Today your child will be bringing home a yellow sheet that lists a bunch of different options for reading and writing that they can choose from 3-5 times a week.  There is a calendar on the back of the sheet.  Simply write the number of the activity completed on the date completed and send the calendar back to school with your child on Fridays so we can share our reading/writing adventures as a class.  We will still send books home nightly to support the option of students reading from their book bags if they choose.

Additional beginning of the month information:  lunch menu, specialist newsletter, school newsletter.

Upcoming Dates:
April 4: Sports Day--to celebrate opening day for the Brewers
April 5: Pajama Day
April 6: Dress Fancy Day
April 7: Mixed-up/Backwards Day
April 8: Dress like a cat or a KAT question for our Knowledge-a-thon
April 12: Family Night: Social Studies/Science and Subs
April 18: No School for students
April 22: Earth Day

Reading:  We will finish up our non-fiction unit this week after spending a few days noticing various non-fiction text features and how they vary between texts and thinking about everything authors want us to learn from books.  We will push our partner conversations by inventing our own ways to talk about books in small groups including acting out sections, reading a section, and asking questions to keep the conversation going!  Finally we will celebrate all of this work by sharing our new expertise on our selected topics with the class.

Writing: We are continuing with our ALL-ABOUT BOOKS. We have even challenged ourselves to write a whole book in a day! We are working towards writing more about our topics, aiming for 2-3 sentences per page. Writers can also add to their books when they use pictures to teach others about the topic. Sometimes writers need help when trying to add more to their writing. We will learn how it can be helpful to work with and help a partner by asking them more questions about their topic.

Math:     This week we are starting Unit 5, MATH STORIES AND SCENES WITH TEEN NUMBERS. The focus will be on creating addition and subtraction story problems, visualizing and representing teen numbers as ten ones and extra ones, counting the number of objects in a group through 20, and creating and counting stars to make partners of 10 for a classroom display.

CENTERS:

• The partners of ten game, BUSTED
• PARTNERS OF 7,8,9; JENGA
• CONSTRUCTING TEEN NUMBERS 11-20, as a group of 10 with extra ones
• Making up STORY PROBLEMS and determining if it is (+) 0r (-)

Social Studies:  We will wrap up our All About Me unit this week by spending one more day working on our centers of iPads, timelines, collages, and book writing.  Then we will create our own class "yellow pages" of things we can help each other with at school.  Examples may include: shoe tying, animal expert, finding things, problem solving, etc.

Word Work:  New sight words for the next two weeks: of, what, some, how, your.  We have been attempting to shake up our word work practice in the classroom by practicing writing our words in paint and with play dough.