February 27-March 3

I am so excited to be back to see the students and jump back into our learning this week! Just a reminder to turn in field trip and conference forms if you have not done so already. Check out the last blog post for pictures from the last couple of weeks!

Upcoming events:

February 27: Family Night 5:30-7:00
March 2: Dr. Suess Character Dress Up Day
March 7: Paper Discovery Field Trip
March 10: Author's Breakfast 7:15-7:45 am
March 28 and 30: Parent Teacher Conferences

Reading:  We have been working hard to learn from the words, from the pictures, and from our conversations with partners to figure out exactly what the author has been teaching us in our books. Now, readers will ask themselves, "How does this information fit together?" and "What is this book mostly about?"  This work will set students up to understand and remember information more easily. Synthesizing and summarizing topics and main ideas will help them grow as readers!

Writing:   As we are nearing the end of our All About writing unit. the writers will be focusing on editing. We will check over our work to make sure we:

• used lowercase letters in the middle of our sentences
• used uppercase letters at the beginning of the sentence
• have word wall words spelled correctly 
• have punctuation in our books 
• included an introduction and conclusion 

Math: Mathematicians will begin to explore 3D shapes. We will talk about cylinders, cones, and cubes. We will work on solving story problems by acting them out, drawing pictures, restating the story problem, and writing the equations to match. Using all of these strategies to solve story problems helps students to develop a conceptual understanding of the math they are doing. Another way students build a conceptual understanding through pictures is by using math mountains. Math mountains are used to show the partners of a number. They look like this:

Word Study:   Our new words this week will be:  on, up, this are, & an.

Science: Scientists will continue their experiments with paper. We will test to see what happens when we put water on different kinds of paper. Students will use materials to make recyled paper AND even make their own paper mache bowls. It will be a messy and fun week for our scientists:)