Hello Weckie Families!!
I hope that everyone had a restful and fun Spring Break! The Weckstein's took on Disney, which was anything but restful, but we sure did have a lot of fun! The kids were eager and excited to be back on Monday and the noise level was high most of the day... :-). It's hard to believe we are headed into the third and final trimester of the school year! Please make sure to check Skyward for your child's Trimester 2 report card. These take a lot of time and contain a lot of valuable information about your child that you can use at home to praise, motivate and challenge them to continue to be their best self! Please let me know if you have trouble and need guidance accessing your child's report card on Skyward. Our school office can help you!
Word Study
We have moved into an important area of word study, where we are learning to add endings -ed and -ing to words where you may or may not have to double the consonant before. Think of swim and how it becomes swimming, where you add an 'm' whereas in other words like jump, you only add the -ed or -ing ending. The English language can be tricky but we are learning little strategies for how to tell when to double the consonant, such as if the vowel before the consonant in short in sound. We also break words apart by syllable and this can help us to see where we'd need to double a consonant - think of run and if you added -ing, you would have running. If you broke it up by syllable you would have run/ning or the need for two n's. Next week we move onto to plurals and when to add the 's' or the 'es' ending onto words.
Readers' Workshop
Our Workshop minilessons have been helping us to learn how to 'amp up our reading' when approaching longer or more challenging books! We have taken a look at different strategies to help ourselves as readers for: tackling tricky words, using post it notes at the end of chapters to record main ideas/events of the chapter, using pictures to help us to retell the story, learning to read the same books as a reading partner, learning to find ways to motivate partners to keep reading and we have even done some partner reading this week on Epic Books! Epic is like a digital library filled with hundreds of books, videos and magazine articles for kids. It is free for us to use during the day, 9-3. A few kids have mentioned trying to go on at home and it asks you to pay. This is not something you have to do at all. Totally up to you. I just suggest they take advantage when we can during the week instead and use the free account.
Writers' Workshop
In Writers' Workshop we have just launched our opinion letter writing unit! Our young writers' have learned the parts of a friendly letter earlier this week. They have spent time writing two practice friendly letters that included: the date, a greeting, an introduction, a body of the letter, a closing, a closing greeting and their name. As the week moved on, we transitioned to writing letters that feature facts and opinions about our favorite book or favorite book character. It has been fun to see which books the kids are picking to write about or who their favorite book characters are, and why! We will continue with this next week as we learn to tell more in our letters and continue to practice learning the format of a friendly letter.
Math Workshop
Unit 6 Math Assessments came home earlier this week. The Unit 6 Assessment addressed any new skills taught during the unit while the cumulative tackled skills we have been building upon all year. We all definitely need continued practice with partial sums and ballpark estimation. Continued practice here and at home will help make those two strategies more familiar and easier to use for our young mathematicians! I even find that having learned partial sums as an adult, that's my go-to method now for adding double or triple digit numbers! I hope that the kids will find in time too, how much easier this method can make things when you need to solve math mentally. This week we learned a new game called, "Hit the Target". Students worked in partnerships to solve for multiples of ten by adding and subtracting (using three steps) from a starting number to hit their target number. This was a fun challenge for many! We also spent time this week digging deeper with subtraction from double digit numbers. We practiced using number grids, open number lines and even base-10 blocks to help us solve these tricky problems. Lastly we played a group game called "Basketball Addition" where Team 2 beat Team 1 by 6 points! It was an exciting game of addition for the whole class to participate in and enjoy while also doing math.
Please also make sure to pay attention to your child's home-links! Many are coming back without the directions being followed. These are meant to be something that you can complete with your child. Thank you!
Science
Science homework went out on Thursday this week in advance of our "wind" day next week! Next week we will continue our air and weather unit by "catching wind" outside! Each child was given a pinwheel template and a wind-snake to fully color and return to school. We will be laminating and piecing these two windcatchers together next week before we go outside and catch wind! Pics to come, I'm sure.
Important Upcoming Dates/Info...
- Please continue to pack appropriate weather gear for recess. The weather has been a bit unpredictable this week and we try to get the kids outside daily, so they may need rain coats and hats/gloves still as temperatures fluctuate.
- Friday, April 15th- No school for Good Friday observance
