Writing
We will continue working on writing our own fictional stories this week! Our focus will be on making sure our piece has a clear beginning, middle, and end. We will use story structure and mentor texts to guide us. We will also be learning about parts of speech and examining how writers use nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Reading
Reading this week will be all about reviewing and modeling the super reading strategies we’ve learned so far this year. We’ve learned some awesome strategies that are going to help us become amazing readers for life! Students are working on independent reading and partner reading. We’re focusing on making connections and predictions in their reading using sticky notes to write on so they can emphasize comprehension. We’ll review sticky notes strategies with a non-fiction books for when they’re reading and have a question or learn something new. Retelling a story or chapter to yourself by writing a quick sticky note about what happened is a great way to refresh the memory the next day before students begin reading again.
Please remember to read 100 minutes a week at home. If students read 20 minutes at least 5 days a week, they will reach this goal. Challenge your child to use more than one strategy they’ve learned in class during their at home reading time. To encourage them, you can even buy fun sticky notes to use at home!
Math
This week we are focusing on 2 digit addition strategies. These strategies are setting us up to solve our problems mentally and give us more options when the “regrouping algorithm” doesn’t work! First we will focus on drawing a picture. We can draw tally marks, jelly beans, or base-ten blocks. A visual of the problem will be very helpful when we start getting into complicated problem solving. Then we will learn the “partial sums” strategy, where we break each number into its tens and ones and add them separately to come up with an answer. This is a great strategy for doing problems mentally!
Ask your child to practice their strategies this week. Give them a 2 digit problem to solve and have them solve it by drawing a picture or with partial sums!
We will learn the traditional regrouping algorithm soon, so we are asking that you don’t focus on it at home!
Knowing your basic math facts is critical as we start learning about bigger numbers! Here are some basic fact games that your child can play to practice:
http://interactivesites.weebly.com/addition.html
Social Studies:
This week we will focus on our community. We will discuss the importance of holidays, monuments, symbols in our community, state, and country. We will also recognize all of the different cultures and celebrations the families in our classroom have.
Science:
We are wrapping up matter and we are having fun with a few more experiments to learn about matter. We will review and test this week over types of matter, characteristics of matter and ways matter can change.
If you can donate to our experiments that would be wonderful. Please email if you can send in:
a fruit cocktail cup
a bottle of rubbing alcohol
deflated balloons- We just need 5
16 oz clear plastic bottles- 5
16 oz clear plastic bottles- 5
2 packets of mentos
3 diet sodas
Thank you for supporting your child in hands-on learning!
Your child can also learn more about matter here:
Question of the week: What is the difference between a llama and an alpaca?
Reminders:
Early Release Day: September 23
Box Tops contest deadline: Friday, October 23
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