Weekly Update 1/10/14

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a wonderful break!  We enjoyed seeing friends, teaching Lily to ice skate, and relaxing.  I hope you had time to do the same.

We've been very busy here in room 235 this week!  A few reminders…
* Please continue to send in snow gear, even if it's just cold out.
* There is no school on Monday, the 20th.  
* If you have any cleaning wipes, tissues, or hand sanitizer you'd like to send in, please do!  It's that time of year for colds.
* I was so excited to be able to spend some of the gift cards over break.  I picked up some books for the classroom boxes as well as whole class read alouds.  I also picked up some new games/activities for recess time as our other games were wearing thin.
* Earlier this week, we did an activity called, "What's in my teacher's bag?"  I brought items in that were important to me or helped describe me and the students had to infer what each item said about me.  For example, from a Starbucks gift card, students inferred that I liked coffee.  From a picture of my family, they inferred that family was important to me.  Also, from a running magazine, they inferred that I like to run and be healthily.
A little homework: I would like each student to bring in a bag next week with 3 items.  Each item should help us to infer what the student likes or help us to describe the student.  Please send these items in a bag (plastic bag is just fine), Monday through Wednesday and we will share at meeting time.  Thanks for your help!  

What's happening in room 235?
In literacy, we've been focusing on mid-year assessments as well as questioning and inferring.  Both of these skills are important for students to learn as they become better readers.  The better they can question, the better they are understanding the story.   Next week during reading workshop, we'll be doing guided reading groups using books about Mexico to tie in our social studies units.  In the past, students have really enjoyed these books.  We will also finish up our questioning unit and move to Folk Tales the following week.  In writing, we've been reviewing some grammar, such as common and proper nouns and punctuation.  We also did some creative writing about snow.  On Friday, we wrote an opinion piece on a topic we care about.  This is the beginning of the opinion unit, which we will get into more in the next few weeks.
*Ask your child what they wrote about!
In math, we finished up our geometry unit on polygons, solid figures, and comparing/contrasting shapes.  We began a 10-day unit on measuring and addition called The Art Show.  We began by measuring with cubes and comparing our answers.  Some of the paper is small, some of it is very large and students loved measuring each one!  We will begin to have discussions about how we measured, our results, why measurements may be different, and other ways we could measure more accurately.  We will begin making a blue print for each piece of paper next week.
*Ask your child how big the yellow paper was!
In social studies, we continue learning about Mexico.  We have learned about the geographic regions, compared the rights and responsibilities of children in the U.S.A and children in Mexico, and shaded in a map of Mexico to show different landforms and areas.
*Ask your child to share one fact about a region they learned about.