Happy Thanksgiving!

We had a wonderful and chilly week! The students are very excited for their adventures next week, and I am looking forward to meeting with you during our parent conferences.

Reading
The students took their first reading unit test that focused on reading comprehension, phonics, sentence editing, and writing. The students had the opportunity to write a story about a moment from their lives that they were proud of. I read great stories about learning to ride bikes, braving roller coasters, and earning trophies for First In Math! The reading comprehension portion of the test required the students go back a find answers that were “right there” in the story. We practice proving answers by underlining the portion of the text where we got our information.  Together, we practiced a few comprehension passages on our smart board.

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Our vocabulary word wall is up in the classroom with the nouns, verbs, and adjectives we have studied this year. I am encouraging the students to use these strong words in their writing!

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When we come back we will continue with reading lesson 6 that we began this week. The students will read the nonfiction story “Building Homes” and the play “Hiding at the Pond.” We will learn how to study the text and the graphic features. The graphic features are any headings, charts, graphs, pictures, illustrations, etc. that help the reader better understand the text! We will also be looking at how the author’s word choice helps us better picture what we are reading in our “mental movies.” Our vocabulary words are beaks, break, deepest, hang, pond, shaped, winding, and branches. We will look at the prefixes re- and un-. In grammar, we will continue to study plural nouns (for example children, mice, and moose.)

Writing
This week the students and I worked on their writing portfolios. The students looked at their first piece of writing and decided if it met or exceeded their writing goal. They then developed the steps they will need to take to met their goals. We will have a chance to work towards these writing goals while we move deeper into our unit on organization.

Each day, the students practice sentence and paragraph editing. We have learned when to use capital letters (at the beginning of the sentences and at the beginning of names.) We have also learned to use punctuation like periods, question marks, exclamation points, and commas.

Below, the students have one minute on the timer to turn and talk about the mistakes they see on the scree before we work together as a class.

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Spelling 
The students did very well on the words that end with “y” this week. Our next lesson will cover words that have the short “o” sound, like in the word mop, or the short “e” sound, like in the word ten.

Math
This was a fun week in math! The students practiced measuring using rulers and tape measures. They also had a chance to explore shapes and try some new addition strategies. We had some awesome math discussions as the students shared their thinking and problem solving!

Here we are measuring items in our classroom:

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Here are the students sharing their math thinking, and teaching their peers new strategies!

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Today was a very fun day as we dressed up as people from the Torah! Mariashi read us a wonderful story before school about Abraham, Issac, and the ram.

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