Happy Thanksgiving

Reading and Vocabulary

The students have studied how to look for the cause of story events and their effects on the characters. In our reading curriculum, the students read the funny story The Diary of a Spider and found cause and effect relationships between what the characters did and what happened next. After Thanksgiving, the students will study story structure and think about the ways that characters grow and change. The students will also begin studying singular and plural nouns, like fox- foxes and child- children.

Our vocabulary words are: Arrive, clear, enormous, exactly, float, midnight, rainbow, snowstorm, weekend, and whisper.

Spelling

The students reviewed short u sounds and y as a vowel this week, like in the words hunch and totally. Our next spelling unit covers the long vowel sound in words with silent letters, like rain, read, and road. When we study this in class the students say, “Two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking!” This helps them remember you don’t say the “a” in read.

Writing

This week, the students learned how to write letters to friends and family members! The students focused on capitalizing the start of each sentence and each proper noun, ending the sentence with punctuation, and including strong details.

Math

The students are working on shopping and making change (just in time for Hanukkah!) One common mistake I see during these lessons is the students give too much change, usually an extra ten cents. For example, if candles cost $0.81 cents and the student pays with a dollar, they often determine they should get $0.29 cents in return instead of the correct $0.19. To help with this the students can think of making change two ways- they can start at the price and count to 100 (a dollar) or they can add the price and the change together to see if they get 100.

81 is 19 away from 100, so the change is 19 cents or 

81 + 19 = 100, so the change is 19 cents

Project Based Learning: Social Studies

The students are collaborating on Google Slides to create a digital copy of their class book about goods and services. They have been typing up their notes and noticing areas where they need to do more research (like on supply and demand.) After Thanksgiving, the students will scan in their illustrations and create digital artwork to complete their book!