Third Week

The children are getting very accustom to their new classroom as they are finding their fitting place and becoming comfortable with their surroundings as well as rules and routines.  

Here is a summary of what happened in our classroom:
Getting to Know Each Other…

• Students listened to and watched an interactive story called Giraffes Can't Dance by Giles Andreae.  In this story, Gerald the Giraffes watches all his friends boogie down to the beat at the Africa Jungle Dance and his only wish is that he could dance just as well.  He tries hard to learn, but his clumsy body and his friends telling him "Giraffes can't dance" discourages him to even try.  Finally he meets a cricket who tells him to listen to the music and "find your song."  Gerald soon realizes he can dance he just needed to try again to different music!  After reading this story, students enjoyed two songs which can be found here on our class website Don't Give Up by Bruno Mars and The Power of Yet by Janelle Monae.  Students then thought of an academic and personal goal that they have and posted it on our "Things We Can't Do....YET!" poster.  

​In Langauge Arts...

• Without looking at any illustrations, students used their visualization strategy to really listen to the story I Need My Monster by Amanda Noll.  Halfway into the story, students had to illustrate one scene from their mental movie.  This particular story included rich vocabulary and word choice, so it lent itself well to visualizing the details.  Students got to share their monsters.  Then we read the story looking at the illustrations in the book.  It was really cool to compare students' interpretations!   
• We continue to use highlighting strategies to find text evidence in the stories we read from Wonders.  Using this strategy, students are learning to be critical thinkers as they read closely when asking and answering questions.  
• After reading student writing samples, we talked about what good writing looks like.  Every student got to jut down their own idea on a sentence strip.  Later we sorted these sentence strips based on similarities and developed three categories into a tree map.  The categories we came up with were as follows:
  • IDEAS/TOPIC
    • ​all sentences on topic
    • uses interesting details
    • ideas is clear to understand
  • ORGANIZATION
    • ​has a beginning sentence
    • has an ending sentence
    • sentences come in order
    • uses transition words
  • SPELLING/CONVENTIONS.
    • ​uses capitals and lower case correctly
    • uses periods, commas, questions marks, quotations
    • sounds out hard words and spells grade level words correctly
    • spaces between words 

In math...

• Using our Stepping Stones curriculum, students learn about the counting-on strategy.  Students learned it's much more efficient when you start at the larger number and count on the smaller number.  Using this strategy is faster and leaves less room for error.  Students applied this counting-on strategy when solving word problems.  They had to write matching equations with the unknown in the correct position to various math stories.  For example, the following problem would have the following matching equation:
  • ​​​There were 12 lollipops in a bag.  Mom bought some more.  Now there are 16 lollipops altogether.  How many did Mom buy?   12 + ? = 16​
• ​Students also learned about the commutative property.  They learned that with turn-around facts such as 5 + 7 and 7 + 5 you can switch the two parts and it wont effect the total.  

REMINDERS AND ANNOUCEMENTS

• Field trip Monday (shoes and home lunch is needed)
• PE for group B-please wear shoes and comfortable clothing on Tuesday
• Don't forget to check and sign your child's planner daily!  Thank you!

• Please help your child log the genre he or she reads daily.  It is important to expose them to the correct genre name when referring to the books they read.  The Genre-at-a-Glance chart is located behind the reading log (laminated to the manilla folder).​