Week 10

I was so proud of our class today as we held the student council preliminary election! The nine candidates flawlessly delivered their speeches and shared ways they’d like to make our school a better place. The students listened respectfully and voted for the candidate they felt would best represent our class. We will hold the final elections on November 7th.

Here are the candidates delivering their speeches:

                     

Reading

Chapter book readers should ask questions in their heads as they read. We have been practicing asking questions using our class read aloud and the stories in our Journeys curriculum. One way you can help your child grow as a reader is to ask them questions about the books they read at home (there are questions for fiction and nonfiction books in the middle of your child’s red folder.) If he or she can’t answer your question they can go back and reread. Some questions we have been working on in class are: Where does this story take place? How is your character behaving and why? What are you seeing in your mind as you read? What problem is the character trying to solve?

Writing

Our writers are writing, editing, and editing some more! The students are learning that once a piece is finished, that’s just the beginning! The students are editing their work to make sure they contain the proper capitalizing, punctuation, and commas when making a list.

     

Spelling

The students studied words this week that end with the letter “y” and a long vowel sound. This is a difficult rule to master! We practiced sorting the words based on what you hear, not what you see. The students will continue to practice this in their reading and writing. Next week, the students will study words that contain the short “a” and “i” sounds, like apple and middle.

Below our “teachers” are helping check their peers’ work as the students sorted their spelling words.

     

Vocabulary

This week the students worked on the following words: Beach, center, finally, idea, ocean, seashell, stack, tiny, wave, and wonder. We will continue working on these words next week.

Project Based Learning

As part of our unit on communities, the students are creating collages that represent rural, suburban, and urban communities! Next week, we will learn how these communities work together and support one another.

Math

The students are practicing adding money using dollars and cents. We are also practicing making change. We are also studying addition and subtraction strategies.

Below you can see some of our happy shoppers practicing adding up the total of their purchases and getting back the correct change.