Sept. 16-25

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Dear Parents,

 Part of the math homework this week is to write the numbers by 10’s, 2’s and 5’s.  As your child is writing them they need to pay attention to the direction they are writing the numbers as well as what they think the number really is.  There have been a large amount of students who are writing the numbers backwards as well as reversing the letter.  For example they will think 31 is 13.  They are using the 100’s chart the right way to add and subtract but if they don’t understand that the 3 is in the 10’s place and the 1 is in the ones place they will get the wrong answer. We will continue to use the 100’s chart but we are going to stop and talk about the place value of the numbers.  I have taught the students that when they are doing story problems they are to do 5 things.  1.  Circle the question in the story problem. 2.  Write and equation.  3.  Circle the answer.  4. Show their work.  5.  Explain how they got the answer.  They can say I used the 100’s chart but they need to say I went up 1-10 space and over 3 ones.  They can also draw arrows to show what direction they went.  And other way to figure out the problem is to draw pictures. They can draw pictures and show how they added or subtracted.  We are still working on following these steps and it usually takes awhile for them to get the hang of it. 

Reading:  This week we continued to work on recognizing who the characters are in the story and started to talk about the setting.  We talked about how some stories have more than one setting and it can change several times in a story.  Most of the class did a their first summary page.  They were impressive. In our small groups I help them with word attack and how is the best way to figure out what the word is.  We look at little words in big words, we look at chunks, and we skip it and read on and come back.  We look at the pictures and try to figure out what the word could be by what we have already read.

Spelling:  Our new list is the long A sound using VCE pattern. Some children would benefit from using magnetic letters to manipulate the letters.  The list has both short a and long a patterns.  We want the children to be able to distinguish the sounds they are hearing.  And other helpful hint with spelling is to have the children use a different color of pencil and enlarge the letters of the part of the word they missed.

Science:  Our caterpillars hatched and we let the go.

Social Studies; we had a visit form the Fire Station.  They brought their truck and we got to look inside.  We also talked about Fire Safety and drew pictures that will be entered in a contest.  The winning ones will be put on the Fire Truck for the rest of the year.

Art:  We drew pictures about Fire Safety.

All of my scores have been entered into skyward if you want to check on grades.