Week of September 28 - October 2

It's hard to believe it's October already! This morning, I felt a slight chill in the air as I was walking into school. It almost felt like fall, but then the sun came up and we were quickly back to the hotter temperatures! I am sure ready for some cooler weather, and the kids are too for recess.

This week in language arts, we drafted our first personal narrative and began talking about how to make a lead that will hook our reader. We will work on revising our narratives next week, making them even better. We did an inferencing lesson with Mrs. Swyers class on Monday, as students examined photos related to habitat loss and discussed what they could infer from the photos. We continued our inferring by reading Chris Van Allsburg's book Just a Dream.

This week, we had a chance to read two Scholastic News issues, reading one of them online with their interactive version. The online version has some great features such as vocabulary words and a self-checking comprehension quiz.

Math has been busy this week as we wrapped up our place value study with a quiz on Monday. Then we continued learning subtraction strategies, reviewing on Thursday for a test on Friday over addition and subtraction. Just a reminder about our assessments this year...the district is providing all teachers with a 4 or 5 question assessment for each unit we teach that we are required to give. However, these tests cannot go home. Of course, you can always check your child's progress online through Home Access, so please check there frequently so that you can see how he/she is doing on classwork and tests.

New review strategy in math: students solve various word problems, then cover their work with a sticky note before rotating to another problem. 

Next, we came back into the room and students showed how they used different strategies to solve each problem.

In social studies, we are beginning a unit about citizenship and have been discussing what it means to be a good citizen. In science, we have begun a unit about matter. Students rotated through six different stations, exploring various properties of matter. On Friday, we used the laptops to work through an interactive vocabulary lesson and investigation about matter using Stemscopes.

Friday just flew by with our first spirit assembly of the year, a trip to the library to check out new books, a jazz performance after specials and the math test.

I hope you all have a great weekend, and I look forward to seeing everyone at conferences next week. I sent home reminder notes in Thursday folders, but you can also see the conference schedule online here.