Please keep in mind that Wednesday is Halloween. Lunch will be from 12:00-12:52. If your child is going home for lunch, please pick him/her up from the regular drop off/pick up location for 1-Bu (which is on the blacktop by the glass doors) at 12:00. If your child is returning for the afternoon, please make sure he/she is back school, in the regular drop off spot, by 12:52. The Halloween Parade starts at 1:25. If you have any questions about the day, please don't hesitate to ask.
Here's what we've been doing in the classroom:
Reading : Last week, we starting talking about decoding strategies. Decoding strategies are strategies that people use to help decode (or read) tricky words. In the classroom, we attach a fun animal to each strategy to help the students remember them. So far, we've learned about 'Eagle Eye,' 'Lips the Fish,' 'Stretchy Snake,' and 'Chunky Monkey.' Eagle Eye reminds you to use the pictures in the book to help you figure out tricky words. Lips the Fish reminds you to get your mouth ready to read a tricky word by saying the first sound. Sometimes, the whole word ends up popping out! Stretchy Snake tells you to go sound, by sound through a tricky word, whereas Chunky Monkey tells you to find smaller chunks of words you know in the big word.
The students have been doing a great job tracking their use of decoding strategies by using post-its to record their thinking.
Writing : We launched a new writing unit last week, which is focused on writing 'small moment' stories. These are personal narratives (or true stories about things that have happened in students' lives) that are focused on small moments in time. For example, rather than writing a story all about a trip to Disney World, the student would narrow the focus of his/her story and write about the time he/she went on Splash Mountain and got soaked. Narrowing the focus of the students' stories allows us to work on using descriptive language and adding details.
Math : We spent a lot of time working with number stories last week. We started off by learning about why it's important to label the units in a number story (i.e. what the numbers represent). Then, we learned about a 'start, change, end' diagram to use to help organize the important numbers in change-to-more and change-to-less number stories. We also learned about using number models (i.e. addition and subtraction sentences) to represent number stories.
Science : Last week we continued to learn about stars and how they appear in the sky.
Computers : We did our first Google Drawings activity on the Chromebooks this week. Google Drawings is a Google app that is great for creating diagrams/drawings with various tools. The students were tasked with creating their own constellations by using the circle tool. It required quite a bit of patience for them to create tiny little circles!
Sorry, no pictures this week! Check back next week for pictures from Halloween.