March 2-6

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Marty Kelly, a children’s book author and illustrator, will be visiting us on Wednesday!  Today we read Summer Stinks! and we loved it.  We are so excited to see what his presentation has in store for us this week.

On Thursday, there will be a disability awareness assembly.  This will kick off all of the great activities we have in store for us this month!  We are looking forward to the Cromwell Center presentation and UNH’s performance.  There will also be a Diabetes Awareness Assembly.  We’ll be learning so much about disability awareness.

Homework packets are due on Thursday!

Please remember to send your child to school with all of their outdoor gear for our outdoor science lessons.  Depending on the weather, our hope is to be outside every Monday!

This week, you’ll receive a letter regarding one of our upcoming science projects.  We are asking that you send in toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, clean apple sauce or fruit cups, tissue boxes, cereal boxes, or any item made out of chipboard.  We’ll be using these items for an engineering project.  Please keep an eye out for the letter!  Let me know if you have any questions

This week in...

Phonics:  We are still working with r-controlled vowels with the spelling patterns /er/, ir/, and  /ur/.  Our focus words are:  clerk, term, herd, skirt, sir, stir, churn, burst, hurt, and turn.

Spelling:  March spelling words will focus on units 20-23.  This week, we’ll work on unit 20.  The words are:  place, well, such, here, and take.

Vocabulary:  Our new words are:  wider, saddest, balance, deserted, freezes, and imagine.  We’ll define these words and show what they mean in our vocabulary books.  Then, we’ll search for them in the short story called “Bill Helps Geese Survive” by Anthony Estes.

Comprehension:  We will practice identifying the cause and the effect in a story.  We’ll practice this while reading Goose’s Story by Cari Best.  

Grammar:  We will focus on helping verbs.  Helping verbs help another verb to show action.  Have and has are both helping verbs.  We use has when the subject is singular and have when the subject is plural, you, or I.

Writing:  We’ll begin our autobiography and biography unit.  To kick off our biographies of famous people, we will begin by writing about ourselves.  Using the information your family collected and turned in as homework, Team Howard will write about themselves.  They’ll include memories of when they were little, in first grade, this year, summer memories, and other memories.  They’ll use these pieces of writing to create a book all about themselves.  We’ll begin the project this week and complete it next week.

Math:  We are continuing our place value flexible groups for one more week.  By the end of the week, all students will be assessed on their learning goals.  We’ll use this information and more when placing students into the next flexible groups which would be focused on solving addition and subtraction word problems within 100 using strategies based on place value.  Team Howard will continue to practice math facts, telling time, money, and odd and even numbers.

Science:  In today’s outdoor science lesson we really challenged ourselves.  Not only did we have to identify different states of matter but we also had to describe them.  For example, some solids are hard and some are soft.  Then, we did an activity where we had to line ourselves up based on the viscosity (thickness) of the liquid we had.  We ended with a game of “What am I?” where students must ask yes or no questions to their peers to figure out what they are holding (pancakes, helium, water, etc.)

Scholastic News:  We’ll read an issue all about the Pony Express!  The article will tell us all about the fastest way to send mail across the country in the 1860s.  Then, we’ll use a map to answer questions about the path of the Pony Express.

Read Across America Day Fun:  Today is Dr. Seuss’s birthday!  We celebrated by honoring his funny and silly imagination.  First, we read Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!  Then, we used a program called Switcheroo Zoo to help us create some incredibly silly looking animals.  Based on the picture we created, we brainstormed stories to tell what our new animals looked like, how they acted, how they smelled, what they felt like, what they sounded like, and what they eat.  Then, we had the chance to illustrate and name our new and silly animals.  Later this week, we will use Dr. Seuss to extend our knowledge of matter!  After reading Bartholomew and the Oobleck we’ll create our own oobleck and decide... is it a solid or is it a liquid?  Check out this fun video of a pool filled with oobleck!

Have a great week!