October 13, 2017

Dear Families,

Important dates to remember:

October 19th: DCC Parent Meeting: 6:00-8:00

October 31: Halloween Parade, 9:20-9:50

October 31: Color Run

November 7th: Election Day, no school

We had another busy week in school! Here are some highlights from our learning:

Reading- We continued to learn about decoding strategies and are hoping that you are seeing your child use them at home. We learned about Skippy the Frog this week who helps us to remember to skip the word we don't know and read on to the end of the sentence. Often your brain will fill the word in for you because it's trying to make the sentence make sense. It's amazing how this strategy works! Often you can find Skippy and Lips the Fish hanging out together because Lips will say the beginning sounds of the word and Skippy will fill in the rest. Skippy helps us to make sure we are making meaning while we read.

Your child should be able to read up to a half hour now. If not set the timer for 20 minutes and build on from there. 

This is a little video about the strategies. We don't have this exact bookmark, but we'll send another one home. This might help you (the parents) to know how we coach the kids when they're reading aloud to us.

Writing - We started another story this week based on the mentor text, "Roller Coaster, " by Marla Frazee. We read the book and noticed some of the craft that the author put into her writing. We made a list and tried to put some of the same authors' craft into our own stories. We included dialogue, onomatopoeia, capitalized words (to show emphasis or loud sounds), parentheses to show extra information and ellipses. We also learned about a couple of different ways to add endings (instead of, "I went to bed!).

Math - In math we finished lessons from Unit two up to 2.6. We focused on learning about the many different strategies that we can use for fact power. Ask your child to share the doubles strategy or the nearly doubles. These strategies give us the power to add numbers quick as lightning and we don't even have to use our fingers and toes...

Social Studies- We had so much fun this week learning about accountable talk and how to agree, disagree and compromise when working together on a team. We learned the phrase, "Tell me more, " when we're not sure that we understand someone. We practiced listening to one another and looking at both sides of a situation and how to say "I disagree" or "I agree." We brainstormed questions that we had about maps, and  looked closely at maps to make a list of things that are included on maps. Then we started working on creating our own team community maps, while answering these questions: 

1. What is a community? 

2. Why do families live in communities? 

3. How are communities alike and different?

4. What should we include in our community to make people want to live there?

5. What should we include on our map to help readers to know about our map?

Next week, we'll continue to work on our maps!

Next week I'll send home information about our Flat Stanley Project. We finished our first Flat Stanley Book and we'd like your help in sending Flat Stanley around the world. More information to come! 

Mindfulness:

Ms. Carol came this week for mindfulness on Tuesday and Thursday. This week's lessons were about heartfulness and body awareness. We learned how to send loving/kind thoughts and how to do a body scan to help us to get to sleep. 

Please see the information on the Parents' Page to learn more about mindful classrooms. 

Have a great weekend!