Back to Learning...

I hope everyone had a fantastic spring break and enjoyed the fantastic weather.  Also, if you traveled I hope you had a safe and fun time with your journey.  I would love to hear about your entire break.  We have ended the 3rd quarter and the 4th quarter is beginning.  Report cards will be coming out at the end of this week or the beginning of next week depending on what day your child comes to school.  Please review the report card and if you have any questions please feel free to ask.

This week we will continue with Unit 5 and discuss the question "What kind of transportation helps us in an emergency?"  We will be reading the story "Mayday, Mayday."  We will be using this read aloud to be discussing cause and effect.  This will allow the children to have a deeper understanding of the story and build their comprehension strategies.  We will be reviewing all the high frequency words we have learned and concentrating on the words: yellow, green, and blue.  It is imperative to continue to practice all of our sight words and to be practicing all of our sounds.  We will be having our next DIBELS assessment in the middle of May.  I know this seems to be somewhat in the distance, but it will be here before we know it.  The children should be fluent in all areas of reading (letter names, letter sounds, and hearing sounds in words).  We will use these scores for report cards and determining your child's next steps.  We are asking for you to practice for about 5-10 minutes nightly.  We will be sending home practice sheets each week.  Please look for these in your child's folder.

The children have been doing a great job with addition.  We will begin to develop an understanding of subtraction.  We will learn the differnece between addition and subtraction.  We will also learn about the subtraction symbol.  One great way to practice subtraction at home is to practice with food or pennies.  You can show your child a set of pennies (less than 5 or 10) and then have them close their eyes and take some away.  Your child then has to figure out how many you took.  This helps with the aspect of mental math.  You can also practice with showing a number sentence to your child and having them try to figure it out (they may need to use materials to help them solve the problem).  One of the most important pieces is to have them explain how they figured out the answer.  This is one of the most important pieces of the mathematical process.

I am looking forward to a fun and exciting week!