LITERACY
The focus of our read alouds this week have been two very important comprehension strategies: check for understanding and back up and reread. The perfect books to practice using this strategy are the Skippyjon Jones books by Julia Schachner.
These books are hilarious BUT you have to pay attention or you miss many of the jokes! By checking for understanding while reading and backing up to reread when necessary, students immediately witness the effectiveness of these strategies. If they don't pay attention, they don't get to giggle along with the rest of us. During read to self, I continue to conference with students and fine tune their good fit book selections and the reading strategies that they should be focusing on.
We have continued to explore spelling patterns during our Making Words lessons. Writing this week continued to focus on journal writing. The students are doing a fantastic job during journal writing! Next week I will introduce our Daily Writing Traits lessons. These mini lessons focus on a common trait for 4-5 weeks. The first trait that we will be focusing on is IDEAS.
NUMERACY
This week we continued our work with patterns, this time focusing on decreasing patterns. Counting backwards was a bit tricky for some students. An easy way to practice this at home is doing countdowns for a task to be finished. For example, while loading dinner dishes into the dishwasher you could say, "Let's see if you can get the dishes loaded before we finish counting down from 50 to 30...50, 49, 48, 47..." Students are usually really good at the countdown from 10 because of our countdowns around the house, "You have ten seconds to get your coat on...10, 9, 8..." Thank you in advance for your help reinforcing this skill at home!
Next week in math, students will be extending increasing and decreasing patterns. They are going to have to find the gap, determining if the pattern is increasing or decreasing and then extend the pattern for a few more numbers.
SCIENCE
This week in science we investigated the rock cycle and the three types of rocks: sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic. We watched some great videos, had a discussion and added to our lapbooks!
I would like each student to bring in one interesting rock to examine and one larger rock (about the size of an adult fist) for painting in art. If the rocks could be brought in a ziploc bag with the child's name on it by Friday, that would be fantastic! Thank you for your support with this!
IMPORTANT REMINDERS
- Wednesday - AdMazing Coupon Book orders due
- Wednesday and Thursday - school photos (Thursday is for Cross Country students)
- Friday - Terry Fox Walk (please send in a toonie for Terry if possible)
- Fill out the student verification forms online before Friday so that your child has permission to participate in the Terry Fox Walk
Have a great rest of your weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment