Hello!
I hope that your week is off to a great start! It's so hard to believe that we are already in our second week of the 4th quarter! As a school we have decided to implement some more options for nightly reading homework for the 4th quarter. Today a list of reading and writing options will be coming home and students will be able to make a literacy choice nightly or at least 3 times a week. Kids will still pack books to bring home each night, as they are always an option. Our school goal is to create meaningful home literacy experiences for all kids. If you have any further questions about this please feel free to email me or write a note in the planner.
Upcoming Events:
Wednesday, April 6: Dress Up Day
Thursday, April 7: Mix Up/Backwards Day
Friday, April 8th: Dress like a Cat of KAT question/answer, Knowledge-A-Thon
Tuesday, April 12th: Family Night-Science, Social Studies and Subs 5:30-7:00
Monday, April 18th-No School-In-service for teachers
Curriculum Updates:
Readers' Workshop: This week we've started our new unit, Thinking and Talking About Books. We will begin the unit with retelling. Students will become aware of the elements of the story, particularly character, setting, and plot which will help them to have other kinds of talks about books. We will learn that readers don’t just have thoughts after they read a book but while they read the book. We will use post-its to mark important parts and character change. We will work on having meaningful conversations with our partners as a way to hold themselves accountable for comprehension. Below is a checklist that we are using to check if we are including everything that we need in a great retell. You might use this same checklist after retelling books that you are reading at home!
Writers' Workshop: We started our realistic fiction unit this week. This is an exciting unit for students because they get to do a lot of pretending! Students will come up with characters of their own, naming and putting them into imagined scenarios. This week we will introduce that characters face trouble and that when characters get out of trouble writers give readers a satisfying ending. We will also spend some time working on spelling and adding “sparkle words” to our writing to help bring our stories to life. We will end the week by looking at the Narrative Checklist to see what we are doing well as narrative writers and set goals for what we want to work on next.
Math Workshop: We've just begun our new unit, 2-digit addition. We are taking some time this week to explore two digit numbers closely. We are doing a lot of work with the 120 grid, before and after, and 10 more and 10 less. Getting to know these numbers really well will help students as we move forward in this unit. Towards the end of the week we will introduce the adding 2-digit numbers through picture drawings.
Science/Social Studies: We are continuing our study of US Symbols. Each day that we have social studies we are choosing a new symbol to study closely. They are becoming experts on each of these symbols…be sure to ask them about what they are learning. It is a topic that they love chatting about! We’ll be sharing some of our learning during our Family Night next week.
Word Study: We will spend the month of April reviewing all of our words from this year. Our goal is to not only write them isolation, but also spell them correctly in our writing. We’ll also be using the patterns and parts from these words to help us spell new words.
As always, let me know if you have any questions.
Kathy
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