Newsletter

Hello!
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.

Important Dates:
Schwest:  Wednesday October 9th at 1:15
Go Home Early Drill:  Friday October 11th
No School: Columbus Day:  Monday October 14th
Parent Teacher Conferences:  Tuesday October 29th Dismissal 11:30

We have been working hard in Social Studies and began our unit on Canada with a review of geography.  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 took a quiz on the location of those provinces, territories, major bodies or water and neighboring countries.  

We have been reading a True Book about Canada which gives a basic overview of the entire country.  As we read, students are highlighting important information and then writing down the key ideas.  They have taken a quiz on that information.  

We will continue to read more in-depth about Canada and utilize a new strategy called Golden Lines to pull out key ideas from the text.   We will learn how to pull out important information and focus on the key 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 are all individuals and that is often reflected in our writer's notebooks.  

We read the hilarious story: 17 Things I am not Allowed to Do Anymore by Jenny Offill and discussed how to model our writing after an author.  We noticed the patterns of the author, style of writing and made attempts to write entries inspired by the story. 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.   

After a review of the writing process, we began our personal narrative unit.  We discussed several strategies to help generate ideas for personal narrative stories.  One strategy was to list a person and then describe moments with that person.  Another strategy was to list an emotion and then describe a time when we felt that emotion.  (These same strategies could be utilized to help your child generate writer's notebook entries.)We will plan, draft, edit, revise and finally publish our personal narratives using Google Docs. 

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. We also read a powerful historical fiction book called Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki to help develop ideas for our Homework Reading Log.

Click on the book icon below to access a copy of the Homework Reading Log Expectations. 

Go Math!

We have been working on taking notes and reviewing some basic skills.  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.  Please utilize the Math Reflex website to assist your child in increasing their fact recall.  

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.