Week 4

Dear Parents,

            This week zoomed by being only 4 days. In the Coyote Folder your child’s first progress report and istation report went home. I have their beginning of year writing sample yet to collect and will be sending home a sign-up sheet for conference times  in about two weeks.

             In math we continued counting money (pennies/dimes), counting with snap cubes (towers and single cubes) and counting using our own drawings of stickers ( Rows and singles). We are getting the hang of number talks and are finding strategies to help us add using mental math. Our intentional problem solving is going well and the children are already enjoying sharing their work in front of the class.

             In reading we read several stories and focused in on the setting and the characters. We talked about the characters having external and internal characteristics. We have our guided reading groups up and running and are working on their independent work stamina (getting work completed on their own while I am with reading groups.) Thank you for helping your child fill out their reading log nightly ( Mon.-Thurs.) and turning it in on Fridays.

             In writing the children have been excited about writing using authors as their mentors and they are busy creating their first book. We are learning how to be fearless spellers, use a spelling dictionary, and our word wall to help them spell.

           In social studies we again focused on being a good citizen, took a self-assessment, and wrote about ourselves for our leadership notebooks. We also worked on a shutter book that tells more about what we want to learn this year. We began setting goals this week and started to track them on our September calendars.

            In science we have been learning about matter and how to classify things by looking at their physical properties. Check out our blog to see some children who took objects from around our room and sorted them by size, shape, color, mass or texture.

• There are quite a few children who come without snack each day. Please send your child with a healthy snack. I try to provide snack if it is forgotten. I bought snacks and had some snacks donated, but those are almost gone. If you would like to send snacks for our tub to help out it would be appreciated. The individual bags of goldfish, pretzels, cheez-its are always met with smiles.
• Please send in earbuds so your child can use the ipads during guided reading.