We have had a great week together...the students are getting into the routine and understand the expectations for work time. We had a visit from Ms. Monroe, the Assistant Superintendent, and she was very impressed with them during their independent reading time!!! We have begun to read and use mentor authors to teach us how to be writers, listening to their words and seeing how they write lots of details about just one topic! We continue to work on our non-fiction features and the reading groups enjoyed creating a Table of Contents for an animal book. Ask your child what their book was about and their chapter titles. We continue to find words with the "ant" chunk in them to add to our list and are working on what ant nests look like. Our spelling station this week was fun...we listened to Green Eggs and Ham and had to put our finger up each time we heard an "am" word. Then Sam I am helped us to write our spelling words in our journals. Our math strategies were working to add three numbers, to make a ten to add higher numbers and to use our strategies to draw pictures and solve word problems. Some new math games were zoo animal doubles and near doubles, and Make a Ten Go Fish. Some more math review and then a test at the beginning of next week. We are working on a close reading of diary entries by Christopher Columbus, and I read some books about him. Be sure to talk about him with your student. I always want them to know why we are off from school and who/what we are honoring for that day.
A big Thank you to Mrs. Meltzer and Mrs. Danaher for coming in to do a lesson on Farm Fresh to You. The students enjoyed some fruit tasting and even found some new ones they now love(kiwi, honeydew melon, Granny Smith apples). The bar graph of their votes helped us to use our math eyes to do some observing and some comparing of the results. They were even good about the fire drill during the lesson!!
REMINDER: next Thurs. is a half-day. We begin the first of three conference days. I look forward to meeting with each of you to share our observations about your child. On Friday we will have our Fire Safety assembly and visits to the Fire Truck.
The Raffe Report for next week:
Math: review of addition strategies and test on Weds. We will then start a unit on subtraction strategies. I will assess math facts for October this week.
Reading: non-fiction use of glossary and index. We will be reading two different fables (and learn what this genre is) about ants. We will then compare The Ant and the Dove and The Ant and the Grasshopper stories.
Writing: looking with a magnifying glass to observe and write details , how to plan and stretch out a story
Word work/Spelling: ANTonyms (Of course) The unit word pattern for next week is an words, so this fits with that word family too.
Science: comparing ants and people, the life cycle of ants
As always, thanks for checking in. I am hoping that these three days off are full of sunshine and family fun!!! As for me, I am off on an anniversary adventure with my husband...
