Thank you for coming to Open House. I enjoyed getting to meet each of you and look forward to a fabulous year! Below you will find some information about what we've been working on so far this year. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
We have been working hard in Social Studies and have begun our unit on Canada with a review of geography. Your child should be studying for our World Map test on Friday September 28th. They will be expected to locate and spell correctly the major continents, oceans, latitude and longitude lines. It is important that your child understand the world and the geographic location of the country we are studying before we can dive into more in-depth information.
We also began our study of Canada with a geography activity locating the provinces and territories. Your child will also be required to take a test of the location of those provinces, territories, major bodies or water and neighboring countries. The Canada Map Test will be on Monday October 1st.
We have also started reading a wonderful book called, Wow, Canada by Vivien Bowers, which is a story about a trip across Canada. We will learn how to pull out important information and focus on the BIG IDEAS we can learn about each province and territory. Please check your child's Assignment pad for future quiz dates on the provinces and territories.
In Writer's Workshop we have continued to develop strategies to create writer's notebook entries. We discussed unforgettable stories and how what is memorable to one person might be less so for another. We also used a photo to writer off of and I suggested that each student should keep an envelope and put in it newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, receipts and use them to write off of when they are struggling with coming up with ideas for journal entries. We are all individuals and that is often reflected in our writer's notebooks. We will also look at our entries and try to develop individual goals to improve our writing. Each week your child will receive an assessment of their writing in the form of a rubric. Please encourage your child to focus on their goals and make an effort to improve.
 |
| Writer's Notebook 2 full page entries a week We will work our way up to 3 full page entries . |
In Reader's Workshop we have been working on ways to generate a written reading response. We have read some really great books to help spark our reading responses. We talked about how we can connect our lives to characters and their actions. We discussed author's message and themes of books. We also talked about just stopping and writing down what we are thinking while we are reading. Then we went back and looked over what we had written and tried to find a spark to write off of.
Here are a few of the books we've read and discussed:
 |
| This is a wonderful story about a young girl and her twin brother who is Autistic. We discussed the different ways people can communicate their feelings and how that isn't always with words. |
 |
| This is a great story about Friendship, War, The Holocaust and it generated great discussion about regret. Specifically how we sometimes say things we wish we could take back. |
Please ask your child to utilize some of these strategies we've learned in Reader's Workshop in their Homework Reading Log entries. Our main goal is for your child to use details from the text to support their written reading responses.
Go Math!
We have been working on taking notes and getting ourselves acquainted with this new program. Our first few lessons have been on place value patterns, properties of operations, powers of 10, exponents and multiplication patterns. WOW! We've been working really hard. You can continue to support your child by helping them improve their fact fluency. We've also started our weekly math quizzes and everyone has done a fine job. Most of the errors students are making are careless. Remind your child of the importance of checking over all of their work.
