Welcome Back!

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a relaxing and joyful winter break and a very happy Hanukkah! 

This week I had a chance to watch our class play hockey in P.E. I think we might have some future hockey stars! 

Reading

As we settle back into our school year, it is very important that your child continues to read at home each day. I am reassessing the students comprehension, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary skills next week in order to plan meaningful lessons for them and I can’t wait to see how much they have grown as readers this school year! As the students move up levels in their books, the books will become more challenging to comprehend! We are working hard in class to develop theories about the characters in our books and practicing how to make inferences based on the clues the author is providing. In our read aloud chapter book, for example, we can’t decide which characters to trust and we are closely watching the way they behave! 

This week the students reread a nonfiction piece on jellyfish and hunted for facts and opinions. We will continue this skill next week. 

Writing

This week the students wrote stories about something that happened over winter break. We are focusing on writing stories with a beginning, middle, and, end. We are also learning how to write stories that start in an interesting way and end with feeling. 

Check out these writers hard at work! 

   

Spelling

This week the students studied words that end in “k” or “ck.” Next week, each student will study a different set of review words based on the results of our mid-year spelling assessment. One area that all of the students can review is writing the silent “e” on the ends of long vowel words like gate and like. 

Vocabulary

Next week, the students will read a nonfiction piece about the Northern lights in Alaska. We will study the following words from that piece: Arrive, clear, enormous, exactly, float, midnight, rainbow, snowstorm, weekend, and whisper. The students will also have a chance to practice writing in complete sentences during this vocabulary unit. 

Math

We are currently studying geometry! The students have studied how to make line segments that end in points, use straightedges (like rulers), and practiced how to identify shapes based on their attributes. We will continue studying and working with 2D and 3D shapes next week!