Wow.. what a day! We were able to get a lot accomplished today in hopes that every day this week will be the same. This week is also Celebrate the Arts week. We will get the opportunity to listen to a storyteller, keep the rhythm with live banjo players, and learn from our artist teach-ins at the end of the week. Please remember that you are invited on Friday to see the children sing, share in their art work, and have lunch outside. Bring your picnic blanket!
Please remind your child to keep reading the Sunshine State Books. They must have read at least 3 books in order to vote on April 19 and 20 and April 24 and 25. They can vote in the library on these days from 7:30-2:45.
Today we began looking at how to take a multiple choice test and how one can eliminate answers that don't really relate to the question. We had a class discussion about sometimes it's not ALL about knowing the answer quickly that make a good test taker. Sometimes a good test taker is one that is able to evaluate and eliminate choices that leads to a correct answer. You will want to take a look in your child's homework folder for the multiple choice activity that we completed. The two skills today were main idea and combining two choppy sentences into one more appropriate sentence. We have done quite a bit of this in class this year, but the presentation of the skill has been different. I wanted the children to be familiar with the approach that you will see on their paper.
We are currently working on our Native American Realistic Fiction Essays. The children have chosen one of the Native American groups that we have been studying. They are a Native American child and are writing from their perspective. In the essay, they must weave as many facts as they can into the essay, BUT without ever mentioning the name of their group such as Northwest Coast, Inuit, etc. The children will share these essays in hope that we will be able to tell which group they are from simply by the facts they reveal in the writing. I told the children that this is a test of knowledge but they get to use the book and their charts to show me what they have learned. We will share these with you at our next Author's Celebration that will come mid-May.
We are still working on fractions. We will spend time this week learning how to reduce simple fractions and identify equivalent fractions. We will apply this knowledge with word problems as well. Please continue to review multiplication and division facts.
This week's spelling words are homographs. These are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced in two different ways depending on how they are used in the sentence. The words are as follows: buffet, conduct, content, defect, desert, excuse, house, minute, object, produce, record, refuse, separate, subject. There is dictation this week that will be recorded in notebooks for classwork tomorrow. I will have the children bring home the sentences to practice writing in cursive for the test on Friday. I will send home a few sheets of writing paper for practice at home during the week.
The children have a reading activity this week entitled, Want Fries With That? Please make sure your child read this once orally to you and then independently. Please don't forget to sign the paper when they have completed the task.
We are beginning our Real-Fantasy-Real Unit this week in both reading and writing. This will be our last formal unit of study of the year. However, there will be other outlets for writing creatively and responding to our class literature. We have almost completed Skylark, the sequel to Sarah, Plain, and Tall. There is one more book to the sequel called Caleb which we will also read with our Buddy Readers.
We spent some time today discussing two historic events this weekend. One of these is the sinking of the Titanic. The other is that all baseball players on the field yesterday were wearing the number 42 thanks to Jackie Robinson. You will want to ask your child what was one thing that Jackie Robinson was afraid of that had nothing to do with baseball.
Tonight's homework responsibilities are as follows:
Spelling...write each word in cursive 1x on the paper provided
Reading...complete the Dad, Jackie, and Me Chronological order activity.... the children are to list the 5 events that they found the most interesting... they must be events with action, not just a detail.. then they are to order according to how they were presented in the story and then rank 1-5 of most importance being 1 to least important being 5 according to how they feel as a reader
Math.. workbook page 190.. some completed this in class
Take another look at the 50 states.. we started our map work without help this afternoon and will hopefully finish tomorrow.. so they get another night of review
Please let me know if you would be interested in having another conference as soon as you can. I like to have these conferences completed prior to the last two weeks of school as my other duties are pressing at the very end of the year. Thank you for your continued support! Hope to see you on Friday at the picnic!
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