August 28-30th

         We had a full week last week with school and class photos, diving into new reading and writing units,  and a new place value unit. Wait till you see the photos, talk about little movie stars and the class photos were done in groups with fun poses, pretty cute!!

*****This week is a three day week, hope you all will take some much needed family time.
 We have PE on Monday and Wednesday and swimming will start September 15th.

Students learned about being master authors by studying the masters themselves with mentor texts. They continue to use idea notebooks to collect ideas about their lives to write about and have planned out and started writing some very thoughtful stories. This year we really focus on revising with details, writing across and down pages with dialogue, interesting words and details that help the reader picture the story as well as rereading to make our stories clear.

In reading the students have been informed they are graduating into reading like adults. Lesson focuses this week we're previewing a book and deciding how to read- what voices to try out. We are also working on building reading muscles by setting stamina goals for minutes, books, pages and chapters read each day. We finished up the week working on reading in longer phrases- no more robot reading=)

Our mathematicians are just starting to explore place value concepts and how to make 100 using Base Ten manipulatives. They are learning that 13 tens would equal 130 and that they can draw pictures of base ten blocks to help them model numbers.

Support at home:
Help your child see they live writerly lives- "wow that would make a great story, or let's pretend we are turning what just happened into a story, how would it go-let's tell it across our fingers". Have your child read out loud describing to you the kind of voice they will try to read in and setting a time or number of pages goal that they could try to reach. Have them reread often to practice reading smoother and with more expression. Also, have them count large piles of things around the house and watch how they organise it. How did you do it, is there a faster way?