Since this week is a short week of school, there will be no word wall homework.
Here's what we were working on in the classroom last week:
Reading : By now, the students have learned about three types of connections they may have with texts - text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. The students are doing a great job coming up with connections as they read, which proves that they're really thinking about the texts that they're reading. In the classroom, the students are using post-its to track their thinking. You may see some post-its come home on the books that your child reads each night.
This week, we'll be switch gears and start our new reading unit, which is all about non-fiction.
Writing : We're deep in the middle of our opinion unit now. The students have been using graphic organizers to organize their thinking and reasoning. Then, they've been using their graphic organizers to write organized, complete paragraphs. They've come such a long way as writers since the beginning of the year.
While we're working on opinion writing, we have also been focusing on some writing mechanics, like capital letters and ending punctuatoin. Please support proper capitalization and punctuation use at home when your child is working on his/her sentences word wall homework.
Math : Last week the students learned about two different strategies that they may find helpful when solving math facts - the 'near-doubles' strategy and the 'making ten' strategy. The students got a lot of practice using each strategy in the classroom, but I don't expect them to successfully use each strategy on their own quite yet. Just like decoding strategies in reading, my goal is to teach the students numerous strategies that they can use to solve math problems. Hopefully the students come across a strategy or two that 'sticks' with them.
Science : We continued talking about force and motion last week.
Here are some pictures of 1-Bu last week: