Week 21

Dear Parents,

         This week has flown by as we had the wonderful long weekend with our families. The children came back ready to learn. In math we continued on with three digit addition. This is a very difficult skill to master and they are acing it. We have learned to be extra careful with our adding and regrouping so that we do not make many mistakes. We will continue this skill one more week and then start subtracting three digit numbers with regrouping. On Friday, the 100^thday of school we did many fun math activities with the number 100 including counting coins, coming up with sums that equal 100, flipping a coin 100 times then graphing our results and so much more!

         In writing we finished up our friendly letters and delivered them to the people who we were writing to. We decided to thank someone for a gift we received over winter break or for an experience someone took us to. We then learned how to write a persuasive letter telling our point of view about a chosen topic. The students had to support their view with three good reasons and write using the friendly letter form. The rough draft will be used as the middle of year writing sample, but we have begun to revise and edit our letters. On Friday we wrote about what we think we will be doing when we are 100 years old!

         In reading we finished our unit on Media Literacy and took our assessment. In guided reading we read our Scholastic News and completed it independently. I have also been having guided writing groups during this time to support the students who need help understanding how to persuade someone by giving good reasons why we believe what we  do.. We are conducting Middle of year DRAs to find the exact reading levels of the students who scored  tier 2 or tier 3 on their January istation. This will continue next week and then the guided reading books will be coming home again 2-3 times a week.

         In Science we have continued our unit on natural and manmade resources. Our vocabulary words are: natural resource, manmade resource, reduce, reuse, recycle, conserve, air, wood, metal, paper, plastic, renewable, and nonrenewable. We have been identifying these resources in and around our school.

         I was so proud of my 4 students who volunteered to present at our CRE Cultural Day! They Did a fantastic Job! Unfortunately one of the students was not able to present because she had a fever, but she still wanted to bring her display to school. Shout out to Analise, Veer,  Brooklyn, and Nida for being student leaders! Pictures will be on our classroom blog.

        Our new leader of the week is Alyshan!

*The CRE Dino-Mite Book Fair will be February 8 – February 15^th. Volunteers are needed! Sign up to volunteer through the CRE Voly page at https://goo.gl/KFNbwi. Contact Mrs. Watts with any questions at wattsbm@lisd.net. 

* Thank you to the parents who sent in part of our 100 day snack! The children loved making it and eating it! Extra snack bags will be made  with the left overs to be left in the room to give to students who forget their snacks.