January...

We are moving right through Unit 3 of Reading Street!  This week, we will be reading, “George Washington Visits”.   This story correlates very well with our question of the week: How is life today different from life hundreds of years ago?  The children will also be introduced to the concept of cause and effect as well this week.  However, we will continue to review the setting, plot, and characters of our stories!  Our Amazing Words for this week are: celebration, sprinted, barn, blacksmith, arch, and soldier.  I think the children will enjoy thinking about how different life was without television, computers, iPods, iPads, and the x-box.  It should be a fun week for discussion!  

In addition, we will be reviewing the letters Dd and Kk and their associated sounds.  Both Dd and Kk are short, quick sounds; therefore, please do not allow your children to add the “uh” sound.  This can create difficulties for them when they segment words.  We will also be introducing two new sight words: “see” and “look”!  

We are planning to continue our work with our other sight words this week and using them to create awesome sentences!  Students will revisit the basic elements of writing sentences this week as we continue our new morning routine.  The children are now required to come in and read a sentence, write a sentence, and draw a picture to show comprehension of the sentence.  Students should be able to show you how they start a sentence with a capital letter, use two finger spacing between words, and end their sentence with a punctuation mark.  Please continue to encourage your child to be writing at home on their days off.  

In math, we will be taking the Chapter 5 test on addition.  You will see the results of this test next week.  After the test we will be moving into subtraction.  The children have done a good job with addition.  Many children are doing well with having cubes to help them complete the problem.  Our hope is to have children doing many addition problems mentally by the end of the year; therefore, please continue to work with addition.  A great site to help you with addition is: http://goo.gl/NgnVA and http://goo.gl/njGoF.