It is hardly possible that we are moving into our second month sailing together....the days go quickly when you are having fun learning....just ask your student! This week we have been working on several kinds of strategies (we are learning that this means thinking skills). In reading we are working to read text and make pictures in our minds as we read. We are also thinking about how we use these describing words (adjectives) in our own writing to help the reader make those pictures. We use our five senses to write what we see, hear, taste, smell or how something feels. In math, we have been starting to learn addition strategies for adding 0, 1, 2 and doubles facts. We are gaining our facts with practice. Thanks for your continued work on addition facts at home!!!! We created captions for real photographs I took when we did our outside ant research and we got to observe and write about what our ants are doing now in the ant farm!! Quite exciting to observe all the changes!
I am changing the class schedule a bit and will give it to you when I conference with you. I want to be able to do Writers workshop every day with the students, and must adjust for when some of our students are out of the room. I hope to have a volunteer calendar ready by Oct. 21.
The Raffe report for Next week:
Math: continued work on addition strategies (near doubles, adding in any order, adding 3 digits)
I will give the October math facts test the week of Oct. 21 so keep up the great practice... We are playing games like addition bingo, addition dominoes and whisper war to work on our facts.
Spelling: Unit 3 words will work on the am family (We are also trying to find words with the ant chunk in them for our chart)
Writing: we will begin our writer's workshop. For the first few weeks we have been working on writing sentences, punctuation, capitals, spacing and neat letters. Now we are ready to create our fabulous stories
Reading: we continue to read non-fiction texts. Our next focus will be on the index and the glossary and using both of these features. I am finishing up our reading assessments and will begin guided reading groups the week after next. Ask your child what EEKK means when we buddy read!
Science: studying and creating an ant nest, reading about the life cycle of the ant We will try to learn a new game to play outside called "Fire Ants".
I hope you are all enjoying the "Indian summer" weather and that it continues through the weekend!
