October 19th – October 23rd   

 

It has been a full week with lots of reading practice and math fun.

 

Reading.

This week we will start sending reading books home!  I have put together a book bag for each child with leveled books, a sheet explaining some of the reading strategies we use and some comprehension questions you can ask while reading.  These books will come back to school each day, so they can use them in class too, but they will keep the same books for a week.  Please have them do a different comprehension question each time you read the book.  By rereading and working on one book at a time, the children will be able to focus on decoding during the first reading and comprehension skills after the second reading.  Rereading stories also helps the children to develop their reading fluency.  Our goal is for the children to not read too slow, but at a fluent pace that sounds like conversational speech. 

 

We have been focusing on eagle eye and lips the fish this week.  This is when we look carefully at the sounds in the words with our eyes and make sure those are the sounds we are saying with our lips. 

 

 

 

 

Math

In math, we have worked on number stories (word problems), talking about how we are going to solve everday problems that have numbers in them, so we can also answer similar problems in math.  We have learned to draw pictures to show our understanding of the operation that is happening (adding or subtracting).  The children have also been reviewing greater than and less than and using a number line.  

 

Writing

The children have been enjoying writing stories using sentence cards to help them.  They have also learned about adding details to their work about the setting that will give us clues about what might happen next.  We have been learning to retell stories using pictures and simple words to recall important parts of the story.  We learned about what Mrs. Makowski calls a story mountain.  Where we start at the bottom of a mountain at the beginning of the story, climb the mountain to the top where the problem or excting part happens and work our way down to the bottom of the mountain by finding out how the problem is solved. 

 

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend

and enjoy some family time together!