Here's what we were working on in the classroom last week:
Reading : At this point in the year, we are shifting our main focus in reading towards comprehension skills and strategies. Up until now, we've been focusing on important building blocks of reading, like decoding strategies, just right books, fluency, etc. Of course, we'll still revisit those important building blocks from time to time, but now we'll be mainly talking about understanding what we read. We kicked this off last week by talking about retelling. Having a child retell a story is a good indicator of how much basic information he/she is understanding and remembering from a text. We'll continue to work on it this week. You can practice this at home by having your child retell a story to you when you're done reading it.
Writing :The students' small moment writing pieces are ready to be published! Last week was all about putting the finishing touches on their pieces by creating a cover, a blurb, and coloring all of their pictures.
Math : The main focus in math last week was dimes. Your child should be able to count a mixed group of dimes, nickels, and pennies by now. This is something you can easily work on at home or when you're out shopping and you get a handful of change.
Science : Recently, our weather has been perfect for our current science unit on weather! I bet the students saw those cirrostratus clouds on Friday and knew that we'd have snow this weekend.
Sorry, no pictures from last week!