I really enjoyed getting to meet with all of you this past week at conferences. I always enjoy connecting with parents and having good conversations about what is happening with your children here at school. As I said at conferences, please let me know if you ever have any questions or concerns.
Just a few reminders:
*Santa's workshop order forms are due on Tuesday, November 17
*Park's food drive ends this Friday
*Thanksgiving break is November 25-29
If you have any stray socks laying around the house, I would love it if you would send them my way. They will work great as erasers for our white boards.
In reading we will continue to talk about characters in our books. We will also continue to work on and practice our reading strategies. Here are the reading strategies we are working on:
Bossy/Silent e (hope - I always tell the kids that the e tells the vowel to say its name)
ar (art - the ar says arrr like a pirate)
ou/ow (frown, out - this is our bandaid sound. What do you say when you get hurt?)
vowel teams (two vowels next to each other - beet, bait, beach, etc. I say "the first one does the talking and the second walks away)
blends (two letters that we say together, but they make a smooth sound - fr, gl, sp, st, etc.)
digraphs (two letters that we say together, but make a new sound - th, sh, wh, ch, etc.)
We've also talked about the endings - ing, s, ed, as well as word families - ad, at, an, in, it, etc.
I have mentioned ir, er, ur to the kids, but we will talk more about this in the coming days.
In writing, we are learning how to write an opinion/persuasive piece of writing. We will continue to work on this over the next few weeks. We will be working at coming up with ideas of things we would like to see different or changed. Then we will try to persuade people to make this change using reasons why they think the change is needed as well as possible solutions to make this change happen. You may be getting letters home persuading you for things in the upcoming weeks :) Please feel free to write letters back to your child.
In math we are working hard at solving story problems with missing partners. Your child should have had three pages of homework this past weekend. If you notice them struggling, please come up with some more problems for them to have some extra practice. This week we will be introduced to solving story problems using subtraction. My hope is that we get the test in before Thanksgiving break. I am planning on the test the Tuesday before break. The test will cover addition looking for totals and missing partners as well as subtraction equations. There will be many story problems where the kids will have to solve for a missing partner and a missing total. The story problems will all be mixed up. We will take the test in small groups.
In Social Studies we will continue to work on our Economic unit. This week we will focus on goods and services as well as producers and consumers.