Weekly Update 10/4/13

**Fall conference sign up is ready to go on SignUp Genius.  Please see other post for more information.

**Homework this week has been Xtramath (or other fact practice) at least 2x a week and reading for 20 minutes or more each night.  Starting next week, students will be doing Xtramath, reading 10 minutes, and completing a reading response online 1 night during the week.  Please see the other post as well for more information.

**Next Thursday, October 10, is an early release day with dismissal at 12:30.  This is a teacher professional development training in writing.

**ASCA starts next week.  If your child is taking ASCA classes, please send a note in to let me know. I do receive a list but like to double check parent information to be sure.  Also, if there is  a time your child will not be going to ASCA as planned, please send a note in as well.

What's been happening this week?

In literacy, we've gotten reading groups up and running and started focusing on activating our schema/background knowledge on topics to help us understand the story.  If we know a lot about butterflies...reading a non-fiction book will be easier for us.  If we've taken a long ride in a car vacation, we can use our schema to help us understand how the characters are feeling when they are taking a long trip.  We will continue our work next week and learn about making meaningful connections to the stories.  We focused on bonus letters and glued sounds in Fundations.  In writing, we've been focusing on grammar areas such as complete thoughts/sentences, punctuation, and asking versus telling sentences.  We also worked on adding to our stories by writing about our five senses.  We also began using a checklist to be sure our work has everything needed to be a GREAT story!  The checklists will help guide my teaching as well as their growth as writers, particularly during writing conferences.

In math, we've been learning how to complete Xtramath on the computer, use doubles facts to solve addition problems, work with cubes to find number combinations to numbers 6 through 10, and solved number stories.  We also took an addition fact test to see where we are.  Students will take this a few times this year to see their growth.  

In social studies, we've been learning the names of the continents and oceans.  Some first questions were "What is a continent?" and "How many oceans are there?"  We have a lot of work to do around this and will continue learning about map skills and begin the United States next week.  One morning message, asked students to list places they've been out of the country...I was amazed the number of fantastic places we've been!

We met with our 3rd grade buddies today too!  Students talked about what they had in common and what was different.  We will sit with our buddies at the all school meeting next week.  

Ask you child...

* How does schema help you understand the story?

* What is a meaningful connection versus a regular connection?

* How can you make your story more interesting to the reader?

* What is a doubles fact?

* Who is their buddy and what do they have in common?