Thank you so much for your fabulous attention and support at Curriculum Night! Please let us know if you have any questions about homework, reading expectations, or anything else! 🙂
Reading and Vocabulary
This week the students continued visualizing, or make mental movies in their minds as they read. We also began comparing and contrasting the characters in our books. Next week, the students will work on finding the author’s purpose for writing (To entertain? Inform? Persuade? Teach? Give directions? Give feelings like in a poem?) We will review the last two vocabulary units and learn about synonyms and antonyms.
This week our word pattern was “short and long u sounds”. All of next week’s words will contain a long vowel sound at the end of the word but the sound will be spelled using a “y”, like in the words pretty and spray. The new words will come home on Monday and the test will be on Thursday, 10/25 (no school Friday 10/26.)
The students began editing their writing this week. They learned that with writing, “When I’m done, I’ve just begun!” After the first draft is finished, it’s time to reread for errors and make sure details are strong, fix punctuation and capitalization mistakes, get help with spelling, and punch up beginnings and endings to make them more interesting! Next week, the students will continue to edit their pieces and learn how to write a summary about something they have read.
This week the students played games to help them practice using fact families. A fact family creates two addition and two subtraction problems using the same three numbers. For example:
4 + 8 = 12
8 + 4 = 12
12 – 8 = 4
12 – 4 = 8
Fact families help the students understand the relationships between addition and subtraction. The students also studied strategies to add more efficiently, how to solve word problems, and ounces and pounds.
Project Based Learning: Social Studies
This week the students began researching goods and services. They looked at the differences between goods and services, how goods like bubblegum and Legos are manufactured, and how goods get to stores via cargo ships, planes, and trucks. The students are collecting their research to write a class book that will teach the reader about this topic!