Weekly News Mar 20-24

Yikes!  We have had a lot of sickness running through the classroom.  We are sending well wishes and a speedy recovery to those who have missed school in the past week.  Let's cross our fingers that these are the last of our winter germs to be shared.

Important Dates and Reminders:

March 29: Wacky Hair or Hat day
March 28 & 30: Parent Teacher Conferences
April 3: Sports Day
April 7: Knowledge-a-thon in the the AM
             PAC field  trip in the PM
April 11: Egg Crack Off and Class Color Day
April 12-17: NO SCHOOL
April 21: Wear Green and Blue for Earth Day
April 28: Funky Friday (dress as silly as you want)

Don't forget it you are looking for ways to help with PSC activities, there are many chances to do so!

Book Fair
http://signup.com/go/zkKGHy

Conference Meals
http://signup.com/go/bEgipo

Knowledge-A-Thon
http://signup.com/go/TNwaqh

Here's a peek at our week:

Reading:  It has been an amazing week of avid reading in here!  The boys and girls are so motivated to be like the grown up avid readers that they know and are getting so much important work done during reader's workshop!  This week we will work to set reading goals for ourselves during private reading and also during partner reading.  We will make individual charts to include tips and strategies we need to remember most when we read and will set up reading playdates in the classroom to plan for how we will interact and react with the books we are reading.  Things we will do on our reading playdates are: play school, read alouds, play pretend, play word finding games.  A big part of making sure we have successful playdates will be avidly reading at independent reading and coming to our playdates with a plan!

Writing:  I hope your child has shared with your some of the important topics they are writing about to persuade others.  Please know you may receive some books or letters regarding "problems" your child might want to persuade others to fix at home or in your neighborhood.  We are really working on using our words as a way to let people know about a problems see and ways we think it can be fixed.  This week we will work on keeping our writing stamina up by thinking of lots of causes to write about and will work on revision and spelling strategies.

Math:  Our main focus in math this week will be working on ways to become fluent at solving addition and subtraction problems within 5.  Right now it is very common (and perfectly fine) for 5 and 6 year olds to use fingers when solving problems, but as we approach 1st grade we want to become more automatic in knowing these facts.  We will review and practice finding patterns (Ex. all +1 equations are just like counting forward, -1 is just like counting backward) in both addition and subtraction and using partners of numbers to help us solve problems quickly.  We will also focus on making sure we are looking closely at equations to see the + or - sign to be sure we are performing the right operation.

Social Studies:  Students will learn about and begin work in variety of All About Me centers this week.  Some of this work includes creating a self time-line, writing all about themselves on an app (similar to this website), creating a collage, and exploring many books.

Word Work: We will continue work on transferring our knowledge of sight words, vowels and spelling patterns using poems and shared reading books this week.