Happy Rosh Hashanah!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Rosh Hashanah! Happy 5777! Next week the students will be visiting the Mecklenburg County Recycling Center. This is a interesting trip and the students will get to learn about reusing and recycling materials. At the center the students will also get to see what happens when materials are brought in from all over Charlotte. This trip goes along with the unit the students are studying in Project Based Learning on being good citizens in their community. We will be leaving for this trip at 10:00 A.M. and we will be back in time for lunch at 12:00 P.M.

Reading

This week we spent a lot of time studying stories to determine cause and effect relationships. The students are learning how to ask themselves why something happened in a book and what the impact was of that event. Sometimes cause/effect relationships are not directly explained in the text and the students have to use the clues the author gives to figure out why something happened! This week we continued to study different types of sentences: Statements, questions, commands, and exclamations. We also looked at nouns- people, places, and things. Next week the students will study plural nouns. 

If you’d like to help your child become a stronger reader, ask them to give you a “Five Finger Summary” of their story. This is  skill we have been practicing each day with our read aloud chapter book. Your child can count off on their fingers the (1) characters, (2) setting, (3) plot, (4) problems, and (5) solutions. If your child cannot remember one of these important story elements then he or she can go back and look for it in their book. This strategy is a great way to get your child to pay closer attention to the text!

Spelling

This week we began studying words that end in the letter “y”. These words contain the long “a”, “e”, and “i” sounds. Examples of these words are: pretty, play, and why. The students will take a test on these words next Tuesday. 

Math

This week the students practiced applying rules to numbers. For example a rule could be to add “2” and then the students were required to add two to each number in a table or figure out what number is missing if two has already been added. To master this skill the students are required to think about missing data in problems like this:

7 + ____ = 10

10 – ____ = 7

____ +3 = 10

10 = _____ + 3

These problems can be quite challenging even though the students know the basic math facts because they are being asked to think about the numbers in an unusual way. Next week we will complete the second math unit and begin unit three! Unit 3 covers place value, money and time. The students will explore some new aspects of these skills like making change, using coins to buy things, and estimating time to the minute when only using an hour hand.