March into Reading and Much, Much More!
Can you believe March is almost half over already?!?! With Spring approaching, I was really hoping for some warmer weather.....doesn't look like that will be happening for a bit though! With that in mind, please continue to send WARM clothing with your child to wear outside for recess. Even though there is not a ton of snow outside anymore, it is rather chilly. Snow pants, boots and warm hats and mittens help tremendously to keep those bodies warm and because there is still snow on the playground if students do not bring their snow pants/boots they will likely not be able to play on the equipment - that is no fun!
We have been busy, busy, busy since our last update. Our focus in both Science and Reading has been about the Solar System and more specifically, the moon. We have been enjoying reading about what makes the moon so fascinating and exploring those new concepts in various ways. We have explored what craters are and how they are formed and then got to experiment with making our own craters, illustrating them and adding them to our science journal. Additionally, we have worked on annotating our Moon article, picking our key details that the author was trying to teach us. Our class has been working on discussing those details as well with partners, offering their own findings to our class discussions.
Our math lessons have been focusing on solving story problems with missing addends and partners in all positions. This has been proving to be a difficult skill to master, although I have seen some definite progress in that area. We have also been working on solving problems with three addends, writing our numbers to 120, and counting concrete objects and determining how many tens and ones the number is made of. We will continue/conclude this unit this week as we look at adding multiples of tens to two digit numbers as well as subtracting multiples of tens from other multiples of ten. You can see below some of the fun we were having working in small groups using concrete objects to count, group by tens and find two digit numbers.
At the beginning of the month we received a visit from Mr. Jeff, Parker's dad, who can in with the Cadillac Rotary. He brought a book donated by the rotary for our class and read it to us. We received the book, How to Babysit Your Grandma. This fun story will be a great addition to our How-To writing unit. Thank you very much for the visit and story Mr. Jeff!
We are continuing on in our spelling and phonics lessons learning about diphthongs (two letters coming together quickly to make a new sound). As we found last week, it is difficult at times to distinguish between to the two diphthongs. This last week for example, we worked on ow and ou. Both of these diphthongs can be found in the medial position of words, which can sometimes make it hard to determine which one to use in certain words given. Keep practicing at home! The more your child practices and in different ways, the more those skills will become easier to remember. If you are interested in additional ideas for ways to practice at home, let me know! I will be happy to share some fun activities to try!!!
We have been seeing some huge gains in reading this year! As I mentioned to many of you at conferences, your child has been working hard to learn and apply various reading strategies to their daily reading and it is paying off! Make sure to keep having your child read at home every night! Our daily book bags as well as our reading group texts that get sent home should be read a few times each evening. This will help your child to build their reading fluency. Additionally, ask them questions about the story they have read. Have them retell the story, ask them to give key details that occurred and what the main idea/big picture of the story was. You can see many of our friends implementing their learned reading strategies on our class Seesaw account! They love reading stories from their book boxes in their videos. Make sure to connect to your child's account so you can see their learning in action! If you need a new QR code and log in information let me know!
We ended this last week with some Reading is Magic fun! Our fourth grade reading buddies came to visit, bringing with them some very fun magic tricks to read to us and share. We are always very excited for our buddies to visit but this time was extra special. After learning and seeing how to perform the tricks, some of our friends tried it themselves as well. Many of them mentioned going home to show their families as well! You can see the fun below!
