Academic
Update – November and December 2017
Reading
Students will continue to work in their guided
reading groups. In these groups, students are reading books that are at their
instructional level. They work on individual reading goals and strategies.
Guided reading groups continue throughout the year but are fluid, so students may
be moving in and out of groups based on their needs. Over the past two weeks,
most groups focused on the comprehension strategy of retelling a story. Once
your child has read a book, they should be able to easily retell the story. We will be doing running records in the next
couple of weeks. We know we will see
great growth!
Writing
Our main focus for the next week in writing will be
using what we have learned and writing an independent personal narrative. We are expecting a question lead (answering
who, where, when), transition words (first, then, next) and an ending. We are also focusing on conventions of
writing – punctuation and capital
letters and spelling high frequency words correctly!
After the independent piece we will begin the unit on
procedural writing. We will expect
students to write a detailed “how-to” piece.
For example, how to make a snowman.
Word Work
We
will continue to add words to our word wall each week. Some of these words are homophones, some have
–ed/-ing suffixes and others are high frequency.
Grammar/Phonics
We will
continue to work with nouns (common and proper). We have started working with verbs and
adjectives. We are expecting to see more
adjectives in their writing. We have been
working on blends; for example, s blends (st, sm, sn, sp, etc), r blends (fr,
br, tr) and l blends (fl, bl, gl, etc). Students
should know that when they see these letters together it makes one sound. We will continue to work on short and long
vowels and how to make vowels long (silent e, 2 vowels go walking, etc). We will introduce commas for dates and a list
and abbreviations for months.
Math
We are finishing up our unit on Numbers. Students should
be able to skip count in a variety of ways (by 2’s starting at 10, by 10’s
starting at 6, by 5’s forward to 50 and back from 50, etc.). They should be able to tell if a number is
odd or even. And they should be able to
compare and order numbers (up to 20). This
unit will be revisited throughout the year.
During the next 2 months we will be extending and
creating repeating patterns. We will
also compare and construct 2-D and 3-D shapes.
During out daily calendar we discuss days of the
week, months of the year, how to read the date, know the day before and after
and the date 1 week ago or in one week.
Important Dates to Remember…
Thursday, November 13rd – no school
Thursday, November 16th – Zumba - $2
Monday, November 20th – report cards go home
Thursday, November 23 – hot lunch for December due
Thursday, November 23 (evening) and Friday,
November 24 (morning) – parent teacher interviews
Friday, November 24 – NO school for students
Thursday, December 14 – Christmas concert (times to
be announced)