Kleenex and Clorox and Lysol oh my!

We are disinfecting everything and telling those germs to hit the road! I missed everyone who wasn’t feeling well this week and hope you are able to rest up this weekend.

Reading

The students are working on reading fluently and with expression. Some of the tricks they are learning to help them are:

1. Reading forward- if there is one tricky word, do your best to sound it out and keep going.

2. Speak like the character- should you sound scared? Excited? Tired?

3. Ask yourself, “What makes sense?” Use the context clues in the sentence to figure out a difficult word’s meaning, even if it is tricky to pronounce. For example: If the passage has been about Hawaiian fish and the author uses the word humuhumunukunukuapua’a, well, it must be the name of a Hawaiian fish.

4. Practice! Practice! Practice! Read out loud to friends, mom or dad, even brothers or sisters. The only way to be a stronger reader is with tons of practice!

Vocabulary

The vocabulary words are: Agree, bare, famous, feast, gentle, hero, leader, notice, search, and weak.

Spelling

This week, the students studied words that end in “ck” or “k.”

Next week, we will begin working on making words plural by adding “s” or “es”, like in the words plates or dishes.

Writing

Next week, the students will switch from writing stories to writing research reports! Each student will pick a plant, animal, or insect life cycle to research and report on to the class. Mrs. Lerner is even going to help us make a life cycle project in art class! The report writing unit will cover the same writing traits we have been studying this year- choosing strong ideas, organizing information, and writing with an interesting voice!

Math

Our geometry unit is going great! The students have learned about 2D shapes like quadrilaterals, rhombi (plural for the diamond like shape, rhombus), parallelograms, and trapezoids. As a class, we are working hard to remember that a pentagon has 5 sides, a hexagon has 6, and an octagon has 8. The students have also studied 3D shapes like cylinders, cones, and rectangular prisms. This week, each student completed a symmetry project where they found examples of symmetrical shapes. Next week, we will continue to work on our geometry unit and practice addition and subtraction strategies.