Week of 1/13

Reading
We spent lots of time learning about complete sentences. Students learned that every sentence needs to have a who and a what happens. This will lay the groundwork for an understanding of the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives). We worked together to practice identifying the who and what of many sentences, including some with proper names and others with pronouns. Students coded sentences by circling the who and underlining the what.

In shared reading, we read Messy Martha. This was a great opportunity to review our digraph sounds (th, sh, ch), review rhyming and practice retelling a story.

Writing
We began to learn about narrative writing in writing workshop. Over the next few months, students will learn how to develop and write a short sequence of events, including supporting details, with a beginning, middle and ending. This week, I introduced the learning target with the mentor text Shortcut. Students listened to this simple narrative and retold the major story events using ordinal words like first, then, next and last. Then, they brainstormed and illustrated the four major parts of their own personal narratives. Using special paper, we began to write the beginning of our stories, making sure to describe the where, when and who of our story. We will finish and share these next week!

Math
We spent lots of time each day solving comparison problems, like the one pictured. Students used one inch tiles to build the fish and see how many extra tiles the larger fish had compared to the shorter fish. We also used number lines to find the difference between the two lengths. They were able to come up with both addition and subtraction equations that could be used to solve the problems.
Later in the week, we explored fractions. Students learned that a fraction is an equal part of a whole. They had fun designing half and half pizzas and half and half rugs to practice dividing circles, rectangles and squares in half using vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines.

Guidance
Mrs. Holt taught us another Second Step lesson on emotional regulation skills. When we are feeling a strong emotion (like anger or frustration), an effective strategy is to stop, take a belly breath, and identify the feeling. Ask your child to demonstrate this for you!

21st Century Skills - Critical Thinking
In library, Mrs. Stanbro began a critical thinking project with us. Our class will be using our special thinking skills to evaluate Chickadee-nominated picture books. After listening to Mrs. Stanbro read Can I Be Your Dog? students had to rate the story's message and whether or not the illustrator did a good job showing the mood of a story. Ask your child to tell you what kinds of colors can be used to show moods like mad, sad, happy and brave.

Upcoming Dates

• There is no school on Monday, January 20th for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Thank you,

Mrs. Bradstreet