March 28th – April 1st

We safely made it through April Fool’s Day and we are ready for the weekend! Next week we will be visiting Discovery Place to explore the topics the students are studying in their Project Based Learning class. We will leave on our trip by 9:30 A.M. so please don’t be late! Next week we will take a trip downstairs to our Book Fair on Tuesday! If you’d like your child to buy some new books, please send them with money on Tuesday, April 5th.

Today, I had the opportunity to join the students during Taekwondo class. Wow! I was blown away by all of the important life skills they are learning in this class each Friday. Along with the Taekwando forms and movements the students get a chance to practice self-control, teamwork, focus, and build their endurance and stamina!

  

Reading

This week the students reviewed many of the reading skills we covered in our first three units and practiced some important test taking skills. We also studied how to add the suffixes “ed” and “ing” onto roots words. Ask your child if they can sing you our songs for adding these endings! We learned that for long vowel words you need to drop the “e” before adding “ed” or “ing” like on the word grade – grading. For short vowel words you have to double the ending before adding “ed” or “ing” like spin – spinning. The students practiced this skill on their white boards and we realized it can be very tricky to remember how to spell hoping vs. hopping!

We began working on visualizing what we read this week. We will continue this skill next week in our chapter books and in the story Luke Goes to Bat. Visualizing is an important reading strategy that aids in comprehension! When you can see what you read in your mind you are far more likely to notice when you’ve made a reading error. Next week we will continue working on the spelling skills mentioned above. We will also work on synonyms (words that mean the same) and antonyms (opposites.)

Spelling

The students worked on words that end in “nk”, “nd”, and “ng” this week. Next week, the students will study how to spell multi-syllabic words!

Writing

We had a big week in writing! Our whole class submitted poems to the Book Fair’s poetry contest! The poems were all about their love of books and reading! We also worked on choosing better words for our writing. The big focus this week was on picking powerful verbs for our writing. We talked about how a regular verb like run isn’t as interesting or specific as raced, zoomed, rushed, hurried, sprinted, or darted.

Here are some of our writers working on finding powerful verbs!

Math

We continued studying measurement this week by talking more about the metric system, perimeter, and capacity. One important part of this unit is learning how to compare measurements like the number of millimeters in a centimeter or cups in a pint. We will continue to practice this throughout the rest of the school year! We measured most of our classroom this week and even used measuring tape to measure each others’ ankles and necks (very carefully!) This week we also reviewed estimation, two digit and three digit addition and subtraction, and comparing fractions.

Here are some of our mathematicians measuring our classroom and each other!