November Already?!

Today, the students saw a fun and informative presentation provided by Duke Energy. The program focused on conserving resources and saving energy. This topic goes along perfectly with the students’ Project Based Learning focus on helping their community. If you would like a free energy saving kit, please return the black card that came home in your child’s red folder.

Reading
The students have completed their fourth lesson in their Journey’s curriculum which focused on finding the cause and effect of characters’ actions. The students also practiced writing friendly letters, identifying nouns in sentences, and writing questions and statements. Next week, the students will read a realistic fiction story called Teacher’s Pets and an informational text titled See Westburg by Bus! Our reading skill next week will be identifying the structure of a story and we learn the important strategy of visualizing when we read. The students will also learn about singular and plural nouns. Next week’s vocabulary words are: Share, noticed, suddenly, bursting, noises, wonderful, quiet, and sprinkled.

Spelling
This week the students studied words with the short “a” or “i” sounds. Next week, they will study words with the short “e” and “o” sounds like check and frost.

Writing
After completing our unit on ideas, the students wrote a personal story this week about a special event in their lives. We are using those pieces to create the students’ first writing goals and then adding the work to their portfolios. One on one writing conferences will continue next week and each student will have a writing goal to work towards throughout the coming weeks.

Math
This week we continued studying adding and subtracting money and learned how to read bar graphs. We noticed that sometimes the most important details on a graph are the words! It is so important to read the graph’s title and the labels on each axis before we try to determine the meaning of the data. We also played with Geoboards this week to make different shapes. This skill will be important when we move into our unit on Geometry. Next week we will end Unit 3 by practicing how to make change after paying for items.

Here are some of the students using Geoboards to create shapes.

Below the students are adding and subtracting money!