Week of 8/29/08

We had another great week filled with lots and lots of fun!

Morning Work: In the Write 4 Today assignments this week we worked on capitalizing proper nouns, adding correct punctuation to the end of sentences, and most important using their, there, and they're correctly! In the Read 4 Today assignments we read the story The Foolish Coyote. This was a story about a coyote wanting to be the king of all coyotes that he chose to foolishly let the blackbirds trick him into thinking he could fly.

Reading: We spent this week reading the story The Fruit and Vegetable Man. On Tuesday, the students read the story and came up with questions they had about the story and its pictures. We were able to answer many of the questions as we continued to read, but some, we just had to guess at the answers. On Friday, we discussed all of the parts of the story and took an assessment on the characters, setting, problem, events and ending of the story.

Math: We are almost at the end of chapter 1! I am planning the end of the unit test this Friday! This week we worked on name boxes. We came up with many different names for numbers. One example of this would be the number 25 could be shown as tally marks, as the math problem 20+5 or even as a quarter. This gets the students thinking about different ways to show a number. We also found differences in numbers. This was quite challenging for many of us. We looked at numbers and has to decide what we need to do to change it to a given number. For example... how would you change 54 to 74? You would need to add 20! We also worked on our calculators and learned how to skip forward and backward. Last, but certainly not lease, we worked on place value and money skills. Don't forget to try and use the money skills we practiced in class when you are at the store.

Spelling: Students were given a new list on Thursday. The list consists of the words they missed on last weeks test, any words they missed from this week's pretest, and words that they are missing in their writing. The next test will be Wednesday!

Science: This week the students finished their cactus life cycle books. They turned out so beautiful! Unfortunately, our bean seeds grew mold so we were unable to plant them. Next week we will get to learn what would have happened to them if we had planted them!

Parents,
As you can see we had a very busy week! Thanks so much for allowing me to spend time with your wonderful children! Also, thanks for all that you do at home to help me out!