September 29 - October 3

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Unfortunately Mrs. Thibodeau wasn’t able to make it into our classroom last week but we rescheduled for this week!  It will be great to see George and Mrs. Tippy Toes again!

Beginning this week, I will be sending home homework.  This week, you will receive a “Homework Survival Guide” to help you understand how the packet will work and expectations for homework.  Expect to see homework come home this Thursday!  It will not be due until the following Thursday!

This year we will be inviting family and friends to come into our classroom as mystery readers!  Look for more information in totes on Thursday!

Our specials schedule:

Monday:  P.E.
Tuesday:  Music
Wednesday:  Art
Thursday:  Spanish
Friday:  Library

Please feel free to send in a water bottle with your child!  They can fill it in the morning and keep it on their desk so that they can stay hydrated throughout the day.  Please make sure that it is only water that is in the water bottle!

THIS WEEK IN...

Phonics:  We are working with the short /o/, short /e/, and short /u/ sounds.  Here are our focus words: went, tell, pet, job, fog, not, tug, hut, tub, and bun.

Vocabulary:  Our new words are:  share, wonderful, company, delighted, thinning, and enjoyed.  We’ll define these words and build connections to them.  Then we’ll search for them in the short story “Making Muffins and a Friend” by Vanessa Lavin.

Comprehension:  This week we will focus on the plot of a story!  The plot is the events that take place in the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  In the beginning of the story, you find that a character has a problem.  In the middle of the story, something happens to solve the problem.  At the end of the story, the problem is usually solved.  We’ll practice this skill while we read Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea by Cynthia Rylant.

Grammar:  We will work with commands and exclamations.  A command is a sentence that tells someone to do something.  It usually begins with an action word and ends with a period.  An exclamation is a sentence that shows strong feeling.  An exclamation should begin with a capital letter and end with an exclamation point.

Writing:  This week, we will introduce reports.  A report gives information about a topic.  This information gives facts based on research.  To go along with our read aloud and to get into the spooky spirit of October, we will research spiders!  In a small group, students will use a resource to gather information on spiders.  We’ll find information about what they look like, what they eat, webs, baby spiders, and helpful spiders.  Then, we’ll compile our research and write a report about spiders.  Starting next week, students will research a specific kind of spider in a small group.  They will find information about what the spider looks like, where it lives, what it eats, as well as some interesting facts.  Then, the group will work together to write a report.

Math:  We are continuing our focus on graphs!  We will continue to work with bar graphs, picture graphs, and line plots.  Our goal is to be able to read these graphs and interpret the data that is shown.  We should be able to talk about how many are in each category, which categories have the most and the least, and also be able to compare more than one category using words like more than, less than, how many more, and how many less.  As a group, we are designing our very own survey questions and gathering data from the team.  Then, using that data we will create a bar graph or picture graph to present to the team.

Social Studies:  Mrs. Sylvester was so kind to lend us her “Olden Days” book!  The book has beautiful illustrations and great descriptions about many of the tools that have changed over the years.  It’s a great connection to what we saw at the fair and also in the “Long Ago, Yesterday, and Today” move we watched.

Read Aloud: We are continuing our adventure through Charlotte’s Web!  With our barn books, we are drawing what we are visualizing while we are listening to the story, gathering characters, and gathering interesting words!

Have an awesome week!