November 5th Newsletter

Welcome to second quarter!  It's so exciting to reflect on the growth of our class from the beginning of the year to now!  In just a little over two months our students are thinking about what would make sense when they are stuck on an unfamiliar word, and then they cross-check that with the letters on the page to make sure it looks right too.  Just to be sure, they know how to "slow check" the word by running their finger slowly under the letters of the word to see if the letters match the sounds they make as they slowly say the word.  This strategy also works great in writing too!

In writing, we are working on finishing up our small moment stories and this week we'll be doing a study of punctuation.  We've learned a lot about how writers write about what they know, and so we've worked on writing about small moments from our lives.  We take one small moment and write lots about it.  We write about what happened, how we felt and what we thought.  Many of us are remembering to punctuate some of our sentences already, and hopefully we'll get closer to punctuating every sentence soon! 

This week in math we will review writing equations for fact families.  We will also apply strategies we have learned for finding unknown addends in equations, continue working on "If, then statements" (If 7+_=12, then 12-_=7), and use mathematical language to communicate our thinking during Number Talks.

I will not be in school a few days over the next two weeks because I am attending a math training. I am looking forward to bringing all my new learning back to the classroom!

This week we will be starting a new social studies unit on neighborhoods and communities.

Make sure to check your child's Seesaw account.  We had some fun with the Green Screen last week and talked about what we're thankful for.  The video turned out very cute!

Special Points of Interest

• Please sign up for parent-teacher conferences if you haven't done so already.  Also, if you need an alternative date/time, please don't hesitate to ask!
• November 9th - Veteran's Day Assembly
• November 12-19 - Book Fair
• No school November 21-25 (Thanksgiving Break)
• If you aren't able to make it to the Book Fair at school, I plan on placing a Scholastic Book Order on November 20th. Shop Online: scholastic.com/readingclub Class Activation Code: JBVLX