Oct.28

Monday is the Halloween Parade ant it is 9:30 in the morning a switch from the normal afternoon parade.  All children are to come dressed in their costumes.

Reading:This week we worked on fluency and rate.  We started to time each other at our listening center to see if we could read the selection faster.  We also performed our Readers Theater for each other.  There was some amazing expression going on.  We have been working on writing summaries.

Math:  We finished our unit on fact families and started our next unit on odd and even numbers. We continue to work on number sense using blocks to count and subtract.


Social Studies:  We colored costume form Africa and found the temperature of different cities in the world.

 Science:  We finished our unit on floating and sinking.

Oct. 23

I hope everyone had a great Fall Break.  I am excited to hear about all the fun adventures that happened over the weekend.

Last week we took a spelling test that allows me to evaluate the phonic areas that each child needs help on.  We did a two act play and lots of reading.  In math we took a quiz and this week we are going to take a test on the things we have learned so far this year.  I will send the results home next Monday.

Oct. 16th

There will be no homework this week except for reading.
 Enjoy Fall Break.

Reading:  We reviewed characters, setting, and authors message.  We begin to talk about the beginning the middle and the end.


Math:  We have been working on Fact Families.  2+4=6, 4+2=6. 6-4=2, 6-2=4


Social Studies:  We talked about Africa, Utah and the oceans and continenets.


Science:  We continues to test objects to see if they would sink or float.

Oct.8

Thank you parents for coming to SEOP's .  It was wonderful to talk to all of you.  For those who could not make it I would love to reschedule a time were you come and visit with me.

Reading: We continue to talk about the character and setting.  This week we spent more time talking about the authors purpose.

Math:  We did hands on math.  We took 10 blocks and divided them into 4 groups.  We drew pictures and wrote equations. Then we looked how we could make a "Friend of  10" or "Doubels".

Social Studies:  We did our end of unit on the North America continent and celebrated by eating hot dogs, apple pie and lemonade.

There will be no homework next week.  enjoy your Fall Break.

September 19-29

REMEMBER SEOP’S TUESDAY AND THURSDAY.

READING:  We continued to talk about characters and settings. We did our second summary page.  About half of the class did this assignment on their own while the other half I guided them through it.  On Friday we did our Readers Theater.  We did 2 plays- Spinderella and Raffunzel.  We added a listening center to our class.  The children will listen and read along with a person reading at the expected Words Per Minute and then they will be given a comprehension quiz on the story. 

MATH:  We did story problems, had a pocket day (Where we counted all the pockets and tried to figure out the best way to count all the pockets.) worked on all the ways we can add or subtract to get 10, and we introduced doubles.

SCIENCE:  We worked on drawing pictures of what happened on our log and we made a diagram of the life cycle of a butterfly.

SOCIAL STUDIES:  We talked about some of the words in the “Pledge of Allegiance”

And the United States is a Republic where we can vote.  We also found the temperatures of different cities in the 7 continents.  American Fork tied with Los Angeles and Antarctica was still the coldest.

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.

Sept. 19-23

We had over half of the parents come to our parent meeting on Wednesday.  Thank you for the support.  I hope you got some ideas on how to help your child this year.  I am sending home the handouts to the parents who were unable to attend.  The orange handout with the holes punched out is to help you with reading strategies while you listen to your child read.  The homework folder would be a good place to keep it so you can refer back to it as needed.   As I corrected the math homework I could see that some parents were teaching their child to add the traditional way.  We will learn how to do this but not until April. We are using the 100's chart to figure out the answers.  There is a copy laminated on the homework folder and a larger one  may be downloaded from my blog under math.

Reading:  Our main strategy we worked on this week was figuring out the characters in the stories we read.  We talked how characters can be animals that take upon human characteristics.   One of the first questions on our weekly comprehension assignment is to name the characters.  They get points for using the name of the characters from the book in their assignment.

Math:  We used the 100's chart to figure out subtraction problems.  We talked about  how the numbers need to get smaller (not larger or bigger) in order to figure out if we should move up or down and to the left or right when we subtract.  Most of the class is doing find with this concept, but there are still some who are needing extra help.

Spelling:  Our spelling test used short a,e,& i sounds and ending chunks.  The students were also expected to write the sight words in a sentence.  Some of the children did a great job and some need to make sure they practice their sight words too.

Social Studies:  We colored the United States of America and answered questions about the land and oceans that surround it.

Science:  Our caterpillars have made their chrysalis.  We are just watching them to see what will happen next. 

We had a fun week with the Read-A-Thon and the Walk-A-Thon.