October

Hello Parents,

I’m sorry it’s been a while since I’ve written. I promise to get better at updating you on what your child is doing all day at CJDS!

First of all, I want to give a big HIGH FIVE to those who were brave enough to run for Student Council. It can be scary putting yourself out there. It’s a very vulnerable feeling but we had 7 friends brave enough to try! Congratulations to Avi and Israel! They were are our top two candidates for Student Council! 

Don’t forget the book fair starts next week! There is a family social on Sunday but if you don’t buy anything then or if you can’t make it, we will visit the book fair on Monday to browse and make a wishlist. Your child will bring their wishlist home on Monday and if you decide you want to send them to school with money to buy something from their wishlist, you can send the money in with them and I will make sure they get a chance to go to the book fair to buy their item(s). Please let me know if you have any questions about this. Or you can ask Elissa Vining 🙂 

This month in reading workshop, we’ve been focusing our learning on understanding characters, summarizing, asking questions and making predictions.  We’ve read some different stories from our Journeys curriculum and our book closet that help us to practice these reading strategies . As a class we read stories together and I pause while reading to see if there are any questions. Sometimes the kids don’t even realize the good reading strategies that they’re already using! Asking questions while reading is a sign that you are engaged in the text and trying to make connections to the story and the characters. We have discussed “good” questions and “not the best” questions. A “good” question would be “Why is the boy tricking his friends?” and a “not the best” question might be something like “Why is his shirt blue?” Questions should help us understand the story better. If the questions doesn’t have to do with the story, the setting, the plot or the characters then it really isn’t a question that will help us understand the content. We practiced this a couple of times as a whole group and with small groups. Our spelling patterns have focused on short vowel sounds and the ending sound “ck”. The kids learned that when a word has one syllable, a short vowel sound and ends with the /k/ sound, it should be spelled with a “ck” and not just a k or a c. In writing workshop we have practiced writing some poems about weather (since that is our PBL topic) and personal narratives. We are continuing to take a small moment and expand on it. We have reviewed parts of speech such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. A GREAT way to reinforce this at home is to do Mad Libs with your child. Remember those?!? We did a Junie B. Jones Mad Lib and the kids got a kick out of it! Next week our target reading skill will focus on sequencing and our strategy will be analyzing/evaluating. Students will ask and answer questions about key details in a text. They will clear up any confusion about the topic through our class discussions. I hope you all have a great weekend!