Week Fifteen

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I thoroughly enjoyed getting to brag about your awesome kids with you during our conferences last week! 🙂 This week all of the students made sure they picked out new books, on their levels, that looked interesting! Please keep me posted if you need any support getting your child to read at home. 

Reading

This week the students read a nonfiction article called Super Storms (and then Charlotte had a super storm!!) We practiced using a comprehension strategy called “jigsaw” where each student read a page of the article and determined which information was the most important to share with the class. Then all of the students came back together and individually “taught” about their page of the article. We put the pieces of information together like a jigsaw puzzle to help us understand the whole article! The students are starting to see that strong readers sometimes have to reread information and talk about it out loud before they really understand it. Next week, the students will read a folktale called How the Chipmunk Got His Stripes and we will work on understanding characters, hunting for life lessons in stories, and summarizing stories. The students will also learn about verbs in the present tense, like walk and write.

Vocabulary

Next week, our vocabulary words will be beach, center, finally, idea, ocean, seashell, stack, tiny, wave, and wonder. These words were chosen from a magazine article the students will read called What Makes Waves? and we will practice our comprehension strategies using this text as well.

Spelling

This week our words contained the long vowel sounds and the vowel pairs: ea, ai, and oa. The students are practicing reading and spelling words with these sounds. Our words next week will contain “ch” and “th”.

Writing

The students completed and edited their writing this week. I was impressed by the way they are starting to use capital letters and punctuation more frequently to form complete sentences. Next week, we will continue learning how to organize stories and nonfiction pieces.

Math 

The students learned about “change to more” and “part part total” addition problems this week. A change to more problem would ask a question like: Yesterday night it was 38 degrees, and tonight it is 57 degrees. How much warmer is it today? A part part total problem would ask a question like: I have 14 hats and 3 scarves. How many pieces of clothing do I have? We also studied temperature and reading thermometers. The students should know common temperatures and be able to give reasonable temperature predictions, like water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212 degrees, a nice day would be around 70 degrees and a very hot day would be around 99. Next week, we will continue working on temperature as well as estimation and measurement.

Here are some of our mathematicians working with partners to solve “part part total” problems:

 

Here are some of our mathematicians using a number grid to find the distance between numbers. For example: the distance between 67 and 92 is 25.

Below, some of our students braved the “freezing” cold to find out the thermometer said it was 50 degrees! 🙂