Happy December! I'm sure that you and your child(ren) have already started the holiday celebrations! Many were excited to attend the Festival of Trees and Lights parade yesterday! It's getting pretty exciting around here. Our Elf on the Shelf arrived right after Thanksgiving and the students are always discovering where he moved to next. He's keeping his eye on them all to report back to Santa.
On a more serious note, we are working on addition and subtraction strategies in math. As you are probably aware I sent out an email and a paper to explain some of the strategies we are learning. I also taught them the "traditional" way of adding that is most familiar to all of you. They will choose what is most comfortable for them and I am encouraging them to use that strategy each and every time they add(however, they need to be aware and able to compute using the other strategies as well) This week we will be working on subtraction.
In Writing we have started a very fun strategy on how to write paragraphs called Stoplight paragraphs. It uses three colors(green, yellow and red) to help students write clear paragraphs about a specific subject. So far we have written about recess and one of our hobbies. We will continue with this until the holidays. We will expand our writing so we are putting two and three paragraphs together. Hopefully this will set students up to be comfortable writing an Informational book after the new year which is what we will be working on then. Check out some photos in our photo library on the web page of the students mixing up their colored strips of their paragraphs and asking a partner to put them in the right order! Fun!
During our reading block we have been elevating our predictions. We have been reading and then making predictions based on what we have read previously in the text, what our characters actions might be or by looking at the chapters in the table of contents and using those as clues for what might be happening. This week we will be learning about how to decode words that might give us trouble and how we can "fix-up " our writing as well as looking more deeply at the characters in our books. In our class read aloud Stone Fox, we have been talking about predictions and it is about a sled dog race. The kids have been really into it, so we did some research on the Iditarod, the most famous sled dog race of all! They did some addition problems to figure out how long the race was in miles. We found out about some of the breeds of dogs and they even talked about doing a service learning project around helping our local animal shelter this holiday season to collect things for homeless pets! Stay tuned!!
Students are doing a great job filling out their reading logs and aiming for the target goal of 20 minutes or longer of eyes on the text of the book. It's important--even if it is holiday stories--Keep reading!!
Speaking of the Holidays we will be having our classroom holiday party on Wednesday, December 23rd from 11-12:15. You will be getting a note soon from our wonderful classroom parents. We have a school wide assembly in the afternoon with a carol sing before we head out for the long winter holiday.
I wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season of wonder, hope and health! Thank you for your faith in me and for sharing your terrific students. They amaze me every day!
On a more serious note, we are working on addition and subtraction strategies in math. As you are probably aware I sent out an email and a paper to explain some of the strategies we are learning. I also taught them the "traditional" way of adding that is most familiar to all of you. They will choose what is most comfortable for them and I am encouraging them to use that strategy each and every time they add(however, they need to be aware and able to compute using the other strategies as well) This week we will be working on subtraction.
In Writing we have started a very fun strategy on how to write paragraphs called Stoplight paragraphs. It uses three colors(green, yellow and red) to help students write clear paragraphs about a specific subject. So far we have written about recess and one of our hobbies. We will continue with this until the holidays. We will expand our writing so we are putting two and three paragraphs together. Hopefully this will set students up to be comfortable writing an Informational book after the new year which is what we will be working on then. Check out some photos in our photo library on the web page of the students mixing up their colored strips of their paragraphs and asking a partner to put them in the right order! Fun!
During our reading block we have been elevating our predictions. We have been reading and then making predictions based on what we have read previously in the text, what our characters actions might be or by looking at the chapters in the table of contents and using those as clues for what might be happening. This week we will be learning about how to decode words that might give us trouble and how we can "fix-up " our writing as well as looking more deeply at the characters in our books. In our class read aloud Stone Fox, we have been talking about predictions and it is about a sled dog race. The kids have been really into it, so we did some research on the Iditarod, the most famous sled dog race of all! They did some addition problems to figure out how long the race was in miles. We found out about some of the breeds of dogs and they even talked about doing a service learning project around helping our local animal shelter this holiday season to collect things for homeless pets! Stay tuned!!
Students are doing a great job filling out their reading logs and aiming for the target goal of 20 minutes or longer of eyes on the text of the book. It's important--even if it is holiday stories--Keep reading!!
Speaking of the Holidays we will be having our classroom holiday party on Wednesday, December 23rd from 11-12:15. You will be getting a note soon from our wonderful classroom parents. We have a school wide assembly in the afternoon with a carol sing before we head out for the long winter holiday.
I wish you and your family a wonderful holiday season of wonder, hope and health! Thank you for your faith in me and for sharing your terrific students. They amaze me every day!