WOW...Lots of Learning...

Children Working Together at the Computer Center

First, I cannot believe where the time has gone.  This year is flying by and I am amazed ever day how much the children are learning.  Second, I want to thank the parents who came last week to conferences and I look forward to seeing the parents who are coming this week.  We had a very packed schedule and we are having to have some phone conferences.  We will be making these phone calls throughout this week.

This week we will be moving into Reading Street Unit 4.  We have a new question "What can we learn from our adventures?"  I think the children will really enjoy this particular unit.  We are introducing new sight words "are, do."  Some children are still having difficulty with our previous sight words "they, you, of."  Please continue to practice these sight words at home as we continue to practice them at school.  The expectation is children should be able to say the sight word within 3 seconds of seeing the word.  We are working with comprehension by identifying the characters, setting, and main idea.  In addition, we work on retelling and sequencing the story.  These are all great questions you can ask your child as you read various stories at home with them.

We are continuing to work on our writing every morning.  Children are suppose to be able to write a complete sentence with spacing, upper/lowercase letters, and punctuation.  Most children are doing well.  The most common error we have noticed is spacing.  The children will start off well, but as the sentence continues their spacing diminishes.  We are also requiring the children to write their first and last names on papers.  Children must be able to write their first and last name correctly for 3rd and 4th quarter.  This requires children to have an uppercase letter and lowercase letters.  In addition there name needs to be controlled, which means on a single line and not extremely large.

In math, children will be assessed on modeling numbers up to 20.  This entails children to build a random number up to 20 on a double tens frame.  The children have practiced this throughout January and February and we feel confident they should do well.  Furthermore, we will be assessing children on the ability to compare 2 numbers.  Children will be required to identify the larger or smaller number of a given set.  We have been working on this skill through the learning game "Top-It" or "War."  Lastly, we will begin introducing one more and one less to the children.  This will help prepare children for addition and subtraction.  Students will explore this skill through various math games.

Once again, I cannot thank you for all of your support at home.  A lot of this learning could not occur without the home-school connection!  You all are wonderful :)  If you have any questions please feel free to email or call!