Dec. 9th

It is hard to believe that we have only one week left of school before break.  The children have been on their best behavior trying to earn money to buy at the class store.  We started to pay more attention on getting classroom chores done because the students are getting checks for how hard they work.  Many children are sharpening pencils, keeping their desk extra clean and the floor  picked up.



 We have not had much turned in to sale and could really use some more items.
  Reading:  Many of the students have passed off all of their Fry Phrases.  This is allowing more time for the parents helpers to work with children who need more help.  Thank You parent helpers.  I try to test the children each Friday on how fast they read.  Every child has improved and most of them have doubled their words per minute.  The children who passed off their Fry Phrases have made the most progress.  Please parents help them with these list.  They can be found on my web site and some children have been bringing them home.

Math:  We finished our base 10 unit and have started on money.  This is a hard unit for many children and any extra help working with real coins at home would benefit the children.

Social Studies:  We are working on the continent Europe.

Dec. 2nd

We are going to have our Christmas store in 2 weeks.  If every child could bring somethings that you would give to the DI to sale at our Christmas store we would really appreciate it.  You can start to bring these items to school.

Reading:  We started our new December Reader Theaters and refined our summaries.  We wrote about something we would see at Santa's house.  We are singing lots of Christmas songs to help with fluency. Our word chunks we were on this week were "at. ake. ame, ail, ain, and ate".

Math:  We worked on place value to the 10's.  I felt like we still need some practice so we have not taken the test yet.   Hopefully this week we will be ready.

Social Studies:  We are starting our unit on Europe.  We did a map study and took the temerpatures of different cities in the world.

Science: We wrote about our favorite moon phase.

Nov. 28th-Dec. 4th

WOW!  We really have been working hard. 
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Our book orders are due this Friday.  I opened all of the available books online if any parent is interested.

Reading:  We started to learn how to write a complete summary.  We have been doing lots of modeling and shared practice. Some groups have started to write them on their on their own others are still working on the different strategies to writing a complete summary.  We shared our Readers Theater with each other.  We wrote about the cornucopia and described different fruits using as many adjectives as we could think of.  It is exciting to see how the children have improved in word attack and fluency.  Also how they interact with each other as they start to work with small groups to figure out beginning, middle and end of the stories.

Math:  We took our pretest on BASE 10 numbers and sometime this week we will be taking our Post Test.  The students should have brought their Pretest home with them if they would like to practice.

Social Studies:  We had our Feast in Africa--in was flour, salt and water fried.  We talked how many people in the world don't have all the good things to eat that we do.


Science:  We made pictures of the moon phases, did an experiment with golf balls and a light showing how the sun hits the moon and the earth.  We also took cookies and made moon phases out of them. We will finish up our unit on the moon next week.

Nov. 12

Language Arts:  We looked for descriptive words in our book share.  Then we started to describe a basket of fruit using adjectives.  We continue to work on comprehension strategies as we do small group and write our summaries.  Everyone in the class is making progress with  Fry Phrases.  We have been trying to increase our fluency by taking timed reading on the same passage.  Every Friday we do our Reader Theater.  The class did a super job following along with each other and using expression.
Math:  We took our ODD and EVEN test and the class did super.  Everyone passed with a B+ or higher.  Most of the class got 100%.  Way to go!!!
Science:  We are continuing to read about the Moon Phases.  This week part of the students homework is to draw the moon at night.
Welcome to our new student Marquez. We are excited to have him in our class.

Nov. 5th

Dear Parents,

I am sending home the Pre Test for our test on ODD & EVEN numbers.  We will be taking the POST test sometime the 3^rd week of November.  We are still learning and reviewing and when I feel like the class is ready we will take the test.  The students put the corrections on the PRE TEST so the parents can know how they should answer the questions.  If you want to help out your child you could go over the PRE TEST to see how they are doing and where they need to improve.  Also your child should be on + 10 combos on their math drills.  If they are not to that point you may want to spend some extra time reviewing with them. Many times just asking them problems as you are preparing dinner or getting ready for bed is enough to help the children learn their facts.

          I am really proud of their progress in READING.  They are doing a great job on their summaries.  Most of the children are able to do them on their own.  I am amazed when I get the monthly READING CALENDARS and see all the minutes they read.  You are wonderful parents and I appreciate all you do help them with reading, math and spelling. Everyone is working on FRY PHARASES now.  You can check to see where your child is at on their HOMEWORK FOLDER.  We have 2 students who have actually passed off all their Fry Phrases.

        We are starting our Moon unit in science.  Next week the students will be bringing home an assignment where they will need to draw the moon phases.

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.