Week Ending 1/26/18

Hello families!
We've had a busy week and today we hit day 90!  We're halfway through the year already!  Can you believe it?

Important Information:

• Please send your child in with boots event if it's not snowing.  The field can often be wet and sneakers get soggy quick.  
• I've notified those that were chosen from the jar to be chaperones.  More info for everyone on the field trips will come as we get closer.  
• Next week, I will send home information regarding the 100th day of school and Friendship week.
• A reminder about homework.  The conversation sheet with sentence starters is meant to check off 2-3 you used that night.  Making the conversation between you and your child stronger and deeper versus using as many sentence starters as you can.  
• If you'd like to donate paper towels, cleaning wipes, or hand sanitizer...we'd greatly appreciate it!

3, 2, 1 things you should know about our week...

3 math skills we worked on were being strategic in choosing what to add or subtract in order to capture the square.  It's a great math game that allows students to put operations together to capture the square.  We also worked on identifying attributes of shapes and parallel lines.  

* Ask you child what parallel lines are and look around your house to see if you can find any!

2 writing strategies we focused on was adding an introduction that captured the reader's attention by writing to the reader, asking questions, or sharing facts.  We also worked on double checking our table of contents to see if it needed some work.  Did we have to rearrange the order of our chapters?  Add chapters in or take something out?  This is all part of the writing process and working pairs, they thoughtfully made decisions.

* Ask your child what their writing topic is and to share more info about one chapter.  

1 area we are continuing to work on is using quiet signals for class conversations.  We are working on responding to each other's ideas for more conversation in the classroom with less teacher prompting.  Students have been building on each other's ideas, agreeing and disagreeing respectfully, commenting, and questioning with others in whole group and in pairs.  

* Ask your child more about our quiet signals and words to say when using them.