Week 19

Dear Parents,

                     We have had an amazing swim week! The children learned how to help, or save themselves in many dangerous water situations. There were a few nervous beginners, but by the second day trust had been built with their instructors. We had beginners, swimmers, and two expert swimmers who could make it all the way down to the end of the swim lane. Way to go Jirah and Maddox! Look on our blog for videos and pictures of our week at the LISD Aquatic Center.

                    This week (because of swim week) our plans were not full as two hours of our day was spent swimming. We continued on in math learning multiplication and division: how to write a story that matched one of these types of number sentences. Our go to phrase to remember how to write one  is: two sentences and a question. We learned about arrays as rows and columns. Rows go across.Columns go up and down. We built our own Array City to show our multiplication sentences.

                    In writing the children continued on with their bold beginning, mighty middle, and excellent ending stories. Some children have begun a final copy after taking their story through the writing process.

                     In reading we read the story Mr. Tannen’s Tie Trouble and worked on our inferencing skills. We reviewed story structure and took a comprehension check. We also designed a tie for Mr. Tannen and wrote to a prompt: My Principal Rocks or What I think my principal does all day is …  I really can’t wait to read them! We also visited adjectives and wrote the ones who reminded us of Mrs. Cervantes. Your children think she is kind, happy, smart, responsible, helpful, respectful, caring, and fun!

                     We will continue on in science next week, but did have time to play our SWAT game to identify salt  and fresh  bodies of water. The children love this game and have learned vocabulary such as glacier, ocean, river, stream, salt marsh, lake and iceberg. They are able to match the name of these water sources to a picture.

                      In social studies we had a few students finishing up their landform brochure. We are in the second half of the year where I have a deadline for completion of projects. Grades may drop a bit if they do not use their time wisely. Only test grades may be corrected for a 70. Project grades may not be adjusted.

                     We did reassess the second grade to see what spelling stage each child is currently performing. The weekly tests, even if all 100s do not show what feature points in words have been internalized and used in every day writing. Your child’s spelling group may change next week.

I am also requesting that all children bring in 4 more large glue sticks, two large pink erasers, a new box of 24 crayons and more number 2 pencils as our supply is getting low. Thank you for your help. Only 8 children have brought new supplies. Everyone of them need of them. The children are borrowing from each other as all are running out of their supplies.