Back in the Routine!

We have finished another great week! The students are continuing to master our rituals and routines and things are flowing smoothly! The students helped develop these four classroom expectations that we use throughout our day:

Reading
This week the students continued practicing picking out “just right” books. Please encourage your child to bring their bag of books back to school each day so that they can read their books cover to cover before moving on to new books. As we move into reading level “J” and up, it is important that the students begin to pick out chapter books and stick with them!

 

The students practice writing “five finger summaries” this week as their first way to respond to what they are reading. These summaries are a quick way for the students to show that they comprehend what they read. To complete these summaries the students list on their fingers the characters, setting, plot, problem, and solution in their books. This type of summary will be one of the ways the students can respond to their books when we begin writing reading responses as part of our homework in a few weeks.

Spelling
We completed our 250 high frequency words spelling test this week! The students will have two of these words to study each week as part of their spelling list. On Tuesday, we will begin our first spelling unit which focuses on short “a” and long “a” words like cabin and snake. The students took a pretest on these words today and picked out words on their level based on their pretest results.

Writing 
Next week, we will begin our first writing unit in our Write Traits curriculum. This unit is on ideas. Throughout this unit the students will learn and practice how to write with a clear main message, stick to the main topic, choose interesting details, and write in a way that is easy to understand.

Math 
This week we reviewed time, money (counting coins and dollars), and reading calendars. These are all great math skills that you can practice in your everyday life! The students also learned the expectations for working respectfully with partners. Next week, we will work on finding patterns in numbers, writing numbers in the thousandths, place value, and using the greater than, less than, and equal to symbols.

Here are some pictures of our math work from this week: