Important Dates . . .
September 28 -- Final Magazine Sale Turn-in
September 29 -- Independent Reading Folder turn in
September 30 -- Picture Day
-- Reading Party
October 1 -- Assembly
Plan Ahead:
*No School on Monday, October 11 - Columbus Day.
Language Arts
We will be continuing our review of basic writing skills in Language Arts this week. We have been reviewing capitalization, punctuation, and the four different types of sentences. The students have had mini lessons then they work on the skills afterwards.
Reading
This week we will continue vocabulary skills with Lesson 19! Your child will be coming home with 7 words that will be studied during the week in class and should be reviewed at home. On the page I will be sending home each Monday there will be suggestions on how you can work with your child & have them get extra practice.
Once again the children had done a superb job with their fluency poem last week! They will continue to be introduced to a new poem this Monday and be responsible for practicing reading a poem at home during the week to focus on reading fluency. This poem is always introduced on the first day of the week and they are to read it to me on Friday for a grade without any assistance. It is important to keep practicing nightly! The poem this week relates to our Science curriculum we will be reading.
We will continue working on phonics, decoding, encoding, and comprehension throughout the week through direct instruction, Lexia, and hands on materials.
Please keep reading 20 minutes a night for the Independent Reading Program! You may just note the time read in increments of 20 minutes in the pages read section. Please sign on the date the reading was accomplished. This red folder should be turned in every Friday to make sure they are staying on track. The Independent Reading Folder should be turned in for a grade on Wednesday, September 29th, to ensure they can attend the lunch reading party the next day, Thursday, September 30th. Keep reading!
Spelling
This week we will begin working through a list of the top 100 words. These l00 words as listed in the "A.B.C. Language Arts Bulletin" Educational Research Service, American Book Co., account for 65% of all running words in the writing of adults. We will continue to work through the list of these words for the next few weeks. Reading and spelling skills will be built at the same time through this list.
Practice pages will be assigned for the upcoming week's list on Friday to give additional study time. Over the weekend would be a good time to discuss the meaning of the words. Although we work on meaning typically on Fridays and Mondays, help from home is greatly encouraged! They will be receiving them daily as an assignment. A test over the lesson will be given this Thursday. Please try to help your child study if you see they are not performing as well as you'd expect on the weekly test. One strategy you can use to help is: Comic Strip - Use this handy blank comic strip form to create a comic strip using each of your spelling words!
Science
This past week we began Chapter 4, Living Things in Their Environments. The "Big Idea" of this chapter is different areas have places where plants and animals find the things they need, such as food, water, and shelter. In class we investigated to find out about how energy flows through setting up an environment in an aquarium. The children really enjoyed monitoring the soil, plants, and worms daily! There will be a brief quiz given as a review on animals beaks and teeth. This upcoming week we will read and learn about how living things survive in different places. To maintain a consistent understanding of the science vocabulary words, we will be building this throughout the chapter in the form of flashcards.
Math
Some of the concepts we continue to review and instruct are numeration, addition and subtraction with word problems, fractions, patterns, and geometry. The students have been gaining much from mini lessons followed up with multi-modal activities.
Daily Homework
Reading - 20 minutes and complete Independent Reading Folder Log - turn in this Wednesday
- study lesson 19 vocabulary words (quiz on Friday)
- practice reading poems given to work on fluency (read to teacher on Friday)
Spelling - Practice Page nightly to be turned in & study words for test on Friday
*Please check your child's homework and sign assignment notebook when complete.
**If your child is having difficulties with their homework please send a note and I will help them during free time.
