Upcoming Dates:
Feb. 17 - President's Day - No School
Feb. 22 - Irving Fun Fair!!
Feb. 25 - Opera for the Young - school assembly
Feb. 25 - Field Trip - North Shore Center for the Performing Arts - Golden Dragons Show - more information to come!
*Italics are repeated from last week's blog.
Reading: We will start a new reading unit called: "Bigger Books Mean Amping Up Reading Power". This unit is all about literary language and meeting the challenges of reading longer books. This week we will focus on noticing punctuation so that our reading makes sense and sounds right. We will also work on noticing character dialogue as well as matching our voices to the meaning of the text.
Writing: We will start a new writing unit called: "Poetry: Big Thoughts in Small Packages". This is such a fun unit where the kids will get to be creative and express themselves through poetry. This first week we will focus on seeing ordinary things in a whole new way, through our "poet's eyes". We will also learn to listen for line breaks. The kids will learn that poets choose topics that mean a lot to them.
Spelling: This year we will be using a program called: "Words Their Way". We will also use another program called: "Phonics Units of Study". We will continue to have individualized word lists. Students will bring their word sorts home on Monday and will be tested on 10 randomly selected words from their sort on Friday. Please spend time working on the spelling PATTERNS from their sorts at home. The goal is not to memorize the words, but to learn the letter patterns.
Math: We continue our module: " Addition and Subtraction to 200". We will learn many new strategies for adding and subtracting larger numbers in this unit! This week we will learn strategies for adding more than two numbers together (for example: 23+85+17). We will also move towards subtraction once again. The students will learn to subtraction larger numbers with more than one place to regroup ("borrow").
Social Studies: We will wrap up our unit on the history of technology. This week we will continue to share our technology interviews with the class. We will also learn about the invention of the first telephone.