Welcome Back!
I hope everyone had a relaxing winter break! We have had a wonderful first week back at CJDS! We reviewed our classroom expectations on Monday and then jumped into a busy week of new material!
Reading & Writing
This week the students read the fiction story Ugly Vegetables. We used this book to practice the important reading strategy of drawing conclusions while you read. To draw conclusions, the students learned to use what the text says and add in information you already know to figure out something that is not directly stated. For example, we read that all of the neighbors in the story said hello to one another and knew each others’ names. We concluded from this information that this is a safe and friendly community where neighbors work together. We also read a poignant picture book called Each Kindness to help us practice drawing conclusions. In this story the main character refuses to show kindness to a new classmate and never gets a chance to fix her mistake. The students were upset by the ending of this book and decided they wanted to write their own endings to the story where they solved the main character’s problem. We have been practicing writing strong endings in our writing unit on organization, so this writing project fit in perfectly with what we’ve been studying! The students wrote alternative endings for the book Each Kindness using the main character, Chloe, as the speaker in their writing. They all came up with very creative ways for Chloe to show kindness to the new girl in class. They then wrote down recent examples of times when they were able to show kindness in their own lives. You can see their writing in the hallway next week and we are working on finding more and more ways to show kindness to those around us everyday!
This week the students also studied the prefixes “re” and “un”, proper nouns, and how to break words into two syllables. Next week, the students will read a nonfiction passage called Super Storms. We will work on identifying the main idea and details of what we read and visualizing the text in our minds. We will also study verbs (action words) and review compound words. Our vocabulary words are: Flash, equal, damage, reach, pounding, prevent, beware, and bend.
Spelling
The students studied words containing the digraphs th and ch this week. A diagraph is when two consonants come together to make one sound. Next week, the students will study words containing fr and bl blends, like in the words freeze and bleacher.
Math
This week the students began Unit 5 on geometry. The beginning of this unit covers shape attributes, like straight sides and angles. The students are learning to classify shapes based on their attributes. For example, shapes that contain five sides and five vertices are called pentagons or four sided shapes that have “square corners” are called rectangles. The students will learn a lot of new vocabulary in this unit, like lines, line segments, vertices, angles, polygons, quadrangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, decagon, and symmetry. The students are encouraged to bring in materials from home for our “Shape Museum.” We are filling our museum with real life examples of the following 3D shapes: Spheres, cones, rectangular prisms, pyramids, and cylinders.
