Thursday, November 4, 2010
Dear Families,
Happy November! I find it hard to believe we are already approaching the end of our first trimester. It has been full and busy for the first two months of school, and a lot of fun! The class has really come together nicely and I am proud of everyone’s efforts to work together and be respectful of each other. As a class, everyone needs to continue to become more aware of their impact in the class and be more aware of others around them.
In writing, we have been completing letters to Zoe’s nana, thanking her for her visit and sharing our most memorable points from her presentation. We are also completing reflections on our trip to the Flynn. Through both of these pieces students are learning about how to structure a piece of writing correctly as well as working through the revision and editing process. After writing their reflection on our trip to the Flynn, student’s are typing them up in the lab and will then revise and edit them using the computer. At this point I am hoping to see complete sentences, that start with a capital and end with a mark of punctuation, and paragraphs that are structured correctly. We have also worked on subjects and predicates, nouns and proper nouns, and sentences and fragments.
Everyone has been doing a lot of reading. There are a variety of book groups which all meet at regular intervals to read and discuss their books. Before thanksgiving break this will change. Everyone will be self selecting a book to read for a book contract. You will be hearing more about this but basically everyone will read a book, write a response to the book, and do some projects to present to the class. Presentations will be before winter break and you’ll be invited in to watch. This change is important and fun. It allows for each child to really connect and respond to a book with more depth and then share this with their classmates.
In math we will be wrapping up our data unit next week. We have had a lot of fun collecting data and learning how to make bar graphs, double bar graphs and line plots. We have spent a lot of time interpreting data and fleshing out the big ideas, being able to say what is typical within a set of data. A fun game to play at home is “Guess my Rule,” your child can teach it to you.
We had 2 guest speakers today. Ask your child to share what they learned about Poland and immigrating to the United States.
Ali Hale
