The Week of October 18th

Coming off of a Bears loss and heading into the week...not exactly the combination we were hoping for. It's a good thing we have so much to look forward to in class. Here's a look at our week ahead:

Picture Day is tomorrow! Make sure to send in your money with your child tomorrow if you haven't already. We are scheduled to have our pictures taken at 11:00.

We will have an Art Awareness lesson this week which will focus on Native Americans. This will be a great warm-up for our upcoming unit on Native Americans in social studies! This week we will finish up our science unit on dynamic earth with our volcano test on Monday. Then we begin to switch gears to social studies. We will be doing a quick geography review and then start learning about the Native Americans.

We begin Unit 2 in reading. Our focus this week is on using our inferring skills to figure out the author's purpose. The kids will be using fiction and nonfiction (baseball themed) to work on purpose. We will continue to work on analyzing characters and using our inference skills in our guided reading groups. All groups will be working with novels this unit.

Our regular spelling routine begins this week again. The kids will take a pretest on Monday and have a chance to make it to the challenge list if they miss 2 or less on their pretest. The spelling lists this week focus on the /ch/ and /tch/ patterns.

In grammar we will review common and proper nouns. The kids will work on both writing and recognizing the two different types. We will practice this throughout the week with our DLA and our grammar worksheets.

In math we will continue to work through Unit 3. Our focus this week will be on multiplication and division fact families. We will continue to work on our fact power with our multiplication mad minutes. We will also work with problem solving skills, looking for key words when problem solving, and determining true/false statements in math.

During writing the kid are choosing one of the personal narratives they have written so far in WEX to polish up. We will be working to add interesting details to this piece to SHOW the reader what is happening. We will also work to add an introduction that hooks the reader and a closing that does a great job of summing up the text.

The children have picked a book that they read for independent reading last month and are working to create a book trailer for this. Book trailers are similar to a movie trailer/preview. We worked on picking out the key points of the story and how we can ask questions to make our audience want to read the book. These book trailers are being made using the program Keynote. We will be adding music and transitions to the slides and we will eventually post our finished products on our blogs. The kids worked last week to post an "I am" poem on their blogs too. Be sure to check out the great work they've done!

We hope you can join us on Thursday for Open House from 6:30-7:30. The kids are excited to show off the classroom projects and the highlights of our classroom.

I think that covers everything for now. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. Have a great week and see you on Thursday!