Greetings from 204!
Have you seen any cute little green men walking around lately? The Weckies are on a mission to catch the leprechauns at Dublin this St. Patrick's Day! Thank you for all of the great recycled supplies you have sent in to help your little engineer construct their traps! The challenge has been posed: Can you create a trap that can catch and hold one leprechaun?
Reader's Workshop:
In Workshop this week we have introduced a new reading strategy called "Wise Owl". We spent time talking about the word "wise" and how it meant someone who was smart and made thoughtful choices. The strategy says to be wise in figuring out the sounds of word with what would make sense with the words around the tricky word. Reading groups have taken a couple of weeks off so I can do individual assessments and because our students have spent more time in partnerships exploring new texts (to practice our new strategy), I have seen all in conferences instead. Look for books to be returning late this week to early next week home. Again I continue to stress the importance of reading daily for 20 minutes at home with your child... we're even working on this with Liam at home too!
Writer's Workshop:
We have been working on a new unit called "Close Reading" in Writer's Workshop... yes, you can write about your reading!! You should have had a mini book come home all about dolphins last week and some additional writing your child did about dolphins. Close reading is exactly that, we read a text super carefully (three times) and then do writing about our reading. We are learning to answer questions about the text and to use DETAILS in our writing! Little by little our writing has looked more like sentences with detailed answers and this is HUGE! We have continued this week and last week with a close reading on Whales. Next week the kids have selected four ocean animals to research in small groups. Look for info to come home with your child as they will need your help researching their animal! We will use our close reading skills at school to learn more about our animals. This includes: Sea Turtles, Sea Horses, Sea Stars and Sharks.
Math Workshop:
We have been busy in Math... we are practicing all sorts of things! Months of the year, days of the week, days a month, counting with tallies, counting up to 100 by 2's and 5's and 10's and then most importantly, working on our addition with numbers adding up to or close to 10. We have done several activities that use pictures or manipulatives to count objects when adding up groups. Please try this at home to reinforce what we are doing at school!
I'll be sure to keep you posted on the leprechauns... the traps are looking awesome!!
Happy Friday!
:-) Mrs. W.
