Friday Flyer

Dear Families,

       Thank you for attending conferences this week.  We have enjoyed having the opportunity to share with you regarding how your child has acclimated to school, as well as ways you can further support learning and behaviors from home.   

During Readers Workshop, I introduced the strategy “back up and reread” sentences when a lot of the text was difficult and had to be stretched. Children need to reread the sentence to “smooth” it out.  This helps support good comprehension and retellings.   We also continue to work on retelling our stories using the words first, then, next, and last after reading a book.   

       Next week, during Writer’s Workshop we will celebrate the end of our first unit with a “splash” of soda (Sprite) as we “toast” to what great writers we have become.  We will toast to several different concepts that we have learned and are now able to do.  Our next unit is “Authors as Mentors”.  We will continue with narrative writing as we take a close look at different authors and study their craft.  The kids LOVE Writer’s Workshop!!

       During math workshop we have been focusing on word problems (stories that are written with numbers involved that students solve).  Students have learned that the most important part of solving these problems is explaining and showing evidence of their thinking!  We can now write equations (ex. 5+2=7) that show how we solved the word problem, draw pictures to help solve, use math tools (unifix cubes, number grid, etc.), and even write a sentence to explain what we did.  We also started our unit on geometry this week!  Students are enjoying our study of shapes and can build shapes using different shapes.  Our math workshop is helping us to explore and teach each other how mathematicians think and share their ideas with others!

              Don’t forget, our Halloween party is next week Friday, October 28th. We start dressing at 1:45, our parade starts at 2:00, and the party is at 2:15!

Have a great weekend with your family,

              Jennifer Mason and Kelly Putnam

* Reminder:

- No school on Friday (Oct. 21)