Last Week's News

Wow- the weekend definitely flew by! I hope you all got a chance to enjoy the beautiful weather we had on Saturday. Before we begin another great week, let me tell you about last week.

Math...
In math, we continued to work on Unit 2 skills. First, we reviewed the term "turn-around" facts. An example of a "turn-around" fact would be, 8 + 9 = 17 and 9 + 8 = 17. Regardless of the order, the numbers equal the same sum. We also learned about fact families. There are three numbers in a fact family, and from those three numbers, you can make 4 equations; 2 addition and 2 subtraction. For example, 6, 3, and 9 are a fact family. 6 +3 = 9, 3 + 6 = 9, 9 - 6 = 3, and 9 - 3 = 6. On Friday, we built fact family houses; they came out great!

Science...
In science, we learned that matter has three states; solids, liquids, and gasses. We did fun activities on the Smartboard to practice categorizing the three states of matter.

Reading...
This week we read a news article called, "Fighting the Fire." The students learned all about wildfires while simultaneously learning about various elements of non-fiction texts, and focusing on main idea. From our reading about fires in small groups and whole class instruction, we also generated fire safety tips and printed them into little "match books." They are hanging in our hallway and they look great! In read, we focused on the short a and long a sounds. When "magic e" is added to the end of a short a word, it makes the a say it's name. For example, "can" ---> "cane."

Grammar...
In grammar this week we learned there are two parts of a sentence. The first part that we learned about is the subject of a sentence. The subject tells who or what the sentence is about. We did a fun activity of cutting out a picture from a magazine, writing a sentence about the picture, and circling the subject to help us practice this skill.

I often refer to the subject of the sentence as "the who." To make it simpler for students to understand the concept of a sentence having a subject and predicate, I tell them that sentences have two parts: the who and the do. The who tells who or what the sentence is about, and the do tells us what the who is doing. It seems to be working so far! :o)

Writing...
In writing, we finally began  truly writing in our Writer's Notebooks! We have been working on personal narratives; telling the audience stories that have happened to us. My goal is to narrow down your child's story from a large topic (i.e., family trip to Cape Cod) to a smaller topic (i.e., finding a beautiful shell on the beach one day in the Cape). This is not an easy skill for children, as they want to tell you all about their trip rather than focus in on a small moment, but with practice I'm hoping they will be specific, detailed writers in no time!

Lastly, thank you again to all of you who have sent in Box Tops. It truly does make a difference at Elmwood and the money we raise helps go towards items to benefit our teaching and your child's learning. Also, if you have been responding to your child's weekend Reflection Journal, thank you!! The children come in Monday morning so excited to read what you wrote!

Below are some pictures of students playing, "Beat the Calculator." As I've said before, this is a great game to play at home and reinforces math facts.

Below is a picture of the students playing, "North Wind Blows." It is a game we play during Morning Meeting.