Friday, January 6th

Happy 2012! I hope that you enjoyed spending time with your family and friends over the holidays. Our week may have been short, but we jam-packed our days with a lot of learning!


Reader’s Workshop
In Reader’s Workshop our students took a closer look at the different types of punctuation. We focused on what the punctuation mark looked like and how to use it properly. Students were given their own punctuation chart to find examples of the different types of punctuation in their “just right” books. The punctuation marks that we focused on this week were: period, comma, quotation marks, exclamation mark, ellipses, hyphen, apostrophe and question mark.
Writer’s Workshop
We started our Small Moments Unit of Study in Writer’s Workshop this week. Students began by brainstorming big watermelon ideas and then broke down their big idea into smaller seed ideas about their small moments. Next, they picked one seed idea that they thought they could write about and practiced organizing their thoughts on a story map (graphic organizer). On the story map, students included important details from the beginning, middle, and end of their stories in bullet point form.

Math Workshop
Our mathematicians have been doing all sorts of things this week! We worked with addition and subtraction strategies for number stories and adding three numbers together. Then we worked with data as we collected information about our favorite foods and created a bar graph. A study guide for our next Math BA was sent home with your child on Thursday. Please set a little time aside each night to practice the math concepts in the study guide. Our Math BA will be on Thursday, January 19th.
Science
Our garlic and plant cuttings have finally begun to grow: however, we noticed that some plants grew at different rates. We just harvested our brassica seeds, when they dry out we’ll replant them to see what happens. Students are making many observations in their science journal, they are amazing botanists!

Social Studies
The past week in Social Studies has been busy! We’ve been looking at ways our community can change and have been learning about good changes and bad changes that can happen in a community, as well as environmental challenges we face! We read the Wartville Wizard and responded to some writing prompts such as: How would you feel about swimming in a lake covered with oil? or What would our community be like if all the trees were cut down?
Word Study
In Word Study this week we worked with three different rules. First, we took a look at the pattern in words that uses a vowel-consonant-silent e and practiced creating words with such patterns (i.e. hope, globe, sore and woke). Next, we continued our look at endings but this time we used the endings -ing and -ink to play a LOTTO game! Lastly, we spent time working with double consonants at the end of words. We made words using letter tiles and once we built a word, we sorted them into categories based on a "ll", "ff", or "ss" endings.
Important News and Reminders:

Thursday, January 12th - Rollerskating at the Rolladium with Mrs. Weckstein!! 6:30pm

Friday, January 13th –Professional Development for Staff – NO SCHOOL

Monday, January 16th – Martin Luther King Jr. Day – NO SCHOOL
Thursday, January 19th –Math Benchmark Assessment

Friday, January 20th –End of 2nd marking period/Family Access closed

Please start saving empty and washed 1 gallon milk jugs! We will be using them for a Valentine’s Day project. Please do not send any jugs in yet. A note telling you how to prep the jugs for our project will be sent home in the near future.

Our December night at the Rolladium... what a blast!