Today was our first Community Based Instruction trip and it was a great success. I am so proud of all of the students! We went to Walmart and you might think..."what can my child learn by going to Walmart?" A lot! We learned about planning items to cook and looking at the recipe for ingredients needed, taking inventory in the kitchen and making a list which includes decisions made about sizes and quantities needed. We learned about grouping our list - we don't want to walk back and forth from one end of Walmart to the other 5 times! And, finally, we learned about budgeting. These are all lessons we have BEFORE our trip. While in the store, there are numerous learning opportunities such as not running into people or things with the cart; minding our own business; using etiquette and manners (such as noticing when someone is trying to look at the soap and you are blocking the whole display or moving the cart over rather than plowing down the middle of the aisle when you meet someone); waiting your turn; saying excuse me...the list goes on. When we return to the classroom, we sort our groceries and talk about where they go. An easy way to follow up at home without even taking your child to the store is to have them help put away groceries...(knowing what goes in the refrigerator, freezer or cabinet is important!) or let them help with making the list. And if they do go along, talk to them about what you are doing and why...things you don't even think about like what part of the store you go to first or why you choose a certain kind of toothpaste are all great lessons for a successful shopping experience.
Reminder for this week - we will have our Winter Party on Friday at noon followed by an early release at 1:15. Parents are welcome to attend. If you would like to volunteer to help or provide treats/ supplies please contact Bianca Como.
Over break, please practice skip counting with your child (counting by 3's, 4's, etc.). This will help tremendously with multiplication and division. I will also be sending home a winter break homework packet for them to practice so no newly acquired skills are forgotten. Look for this in folders this week. It will be due when we come back in January. Ideally your child should work on it a little at a time to get consistent practice rather than completing the whole thing in a day. Lots of time spent reading would be great as well! Reading: We continue to work on learning to be good independent readers. We practice strategies requiring increased independence. For example, encouraging students to pose their own question then find it in the text - then prove it by showing where it was found and finally tell whether it was explicitly stated or an inferred answer. Writing: Writing paragraphs, indenting, using conventions consistently (punctuation, capitals). Also, we are going to practice letter writing this week. Math: Division is hard but we are getting it done! I have shown them several representations/ strategies for division. They seem to be doing very well with using multiplication to divide (for example 20/4 = n is the same as 4 x n = 20). I have stressed that division means how many groups of a number within a number...in above example, how many groups of 4 are in 20? They can then count by 4's to see how many they need to count to get to 20. Social Studies: U.S. Symbols - what are they, some history and what do they represent? Reading - We are still working on main idea and details and character traits. Our current focus is to provide evidence from the text to support answers given. This is hard sometimes!
Writing - Lessons this week will focus on paragraph writing (ties in nicely with main idea and details) but students will all be working toward individual goals in their writing practice. We are writing in Gratitude Journals a few times each week as well. Spelling - Don't forget to ask your student about their current spelling words. They came home on a page divided into squares. Most students will get new words this week as well. I cannot indicate specific skills here as students work on different spelling words based on what they have already mastered. If you would like more information on our spelling, see the blog post from 9/22. Math - We are still working on multiplication. The students are doing well with it! We will learn about multiplying by 7 this week. We will talk about using the distributive property as a strategy (7x8 = 8x5 + 8x2). We used this for multiplying 6 as well. Students have learned about the distributive, associative and commutative properties of multiplication. We will continue to review these daily. As with most strategies in math, students do not have to use any particular strategy but are encouraged to use the one they are most comfortable with. However, I do encourage them to think about the most efficient way to solve a problem (for example if 5 is a factor then they should count by 5's). Science: We just finished Government in Social Studies. We will continue to study U.S. symbols but will do so through reading and writing as a research and writing project over the next couple of weeks. This week we will begin our study of force and motion in Science. Reminders:
- Please return field trip forms along with $2 if you haven't done so. Our field trip is Nov. 7. - Our Halloween party will be this Thursday. Conferences: Thank you to everyone who came to a parent teacher conference. Communication is key to your child's success. If at any time you want an additional conference or have any questions, please let me know and I will be happy to meet with you! Reading: This week our focus will be on determining the main idea. Writing: Descriptive writing, fictional narratives... Lessons this week will be: writing a strong lead; using quotation marks in dialog; story elements such as characters, setting, beginning, middle, end; using adjectives. These lessons will likely continue next week as well. Math: Continue multiplication - review of strategies and carefully choosing a strategy based on the problem. Using an array to solve every multiplication problem is not the best strategy:) We will practice solving and writing multiplication word problems including two-step word problems. Social Studies: Branches of government and their functions. Reminders: No School on Friday; If you haven't returned the page indicating your preferred times for a conference, please do so. You will receive your time confirmation this week.
Reading: This week in reading, we will be focusing on Character Traits and Main Idea. Writing: We have been working on writing a "how-to" piece consisting of three paragraphs. We learned about paragraphs and indenting as well. We will continue to work on "how -to" writing both this week and next. Math: Students are so excited to be learning multiplication! This week we will be focusing on the meaning of multiplication. We will be working with arrays, writing multiplication as repeated addition, discussing the commutative property of multiplication, compare multiplication to addition to determine similarities and hopefully squeeze in some multiplication problem solving. I think that is probably enough for 4 days! I don't think we will be bored:) Even though we are moving on to multiplication, please continue to work with your child on basic addition and subtraction facts if you received a packet for this. Social Studies: We are going to learn about the purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I will be using this page as a quick overview of what is happening in our classroom each week. I will always include a brief explanation of academics and may sometimes have something else to add about the happenings in our classroom.
Currently, students are working to stretch themselves as readers...reading books that challenge them just enough and responding in writing about their reading. We are talking about some comprehension strategies that good readers use to help them better understand their reading such as visualizing, making predictions, asking questions, and stopping to summarize. We want students to be thoughtful about their reading rather than just "plowing through" to get to the end. These strategies are not new - we are simply reviewing them, working with them at a deeper level of thinking, and learning to apply them independently. Spelling is very different than it was in second grade. We don't have a list of weekly spelling words, but rather a large group of words that are used to study and practice specific spelling patterns through word sorting activities. All students do not have the same list and the test isn't always on Friday. Sometimes, I notice a set of words is quite simple for a group and they will only work with the words for a few days before we test and move on. Other times, we may have the same set of words for two weeks. I will be sending home the list of words with your child each time new ones are assigned. The other component of our spelling instruction is application of spelling in daily writing. I will be helping students to become more aware of their spelling in independent writing by encouraging them to check their own spelling - right now students need varying levels of guidance for this - some find mistakes independently while others need for me to tell them which words to fix. When looking at your child's writing at home, feel free to tell them: "there is a word in this line that you need to fix...can you find it?" We want to encourage as much independence as possible. In math, we have finished our review of addition with regrouping and have moved on to subtraction. This has been a little tricky as we are introducing the concept of subtracting across zeros (ex: 3005 - 1244). Please watch your child's folder this week as I will be sending home extra practice for students who need it. I am going to attempt to load a video to my symbaloo page so that you and your child can watch it at home if you would like - it is simply instruction on how to subtract across zeros. I'm encouraging students to use the "box trick" which is described in one of the videos. Please take some time to review basic subtraction facts with your child (such as flash cards) as advanced subtraction is much easier if they don't have to work so hard at each individual subtraction problem. In science and writing, we are working on a combined project - researching (writing) and studying ecosystems (science). Students have finished their research for the most part and will be working on creating a presentation of their information this week. We will be learning about power point which will be one option for presentation. This is an in class project but if you would like to research at home with your child, they can tell you the ecosystem they have chosen. They are welcome to bring in any additional information they find. |
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September 2015
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