A 5 Day Week!!!!

I am really looking forward to our 5 day week. It will feel great to finally get through our routine each day and finish up some of our introductory units. We also have an amazing special guest joining us on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. George Steele is an amazing educator. He will teach our class about mammals. If you are free from 2-3 on Tuesday afternoon, please feel free to stop in and learn with us. Simply sign-in at the office and head up to the Tech Lab. For more information about Mr. Steele visit his website: http://georgesteele.webs.com/

Reading
   We will finish our first unit this week. We will learn about inferencing, explore the differences between fiction and non, fiction, and learn how to write a book letter. Each student will write a book letter during the week. This work will all be done in class! Students write to me about their independent books, and I will write back. Some weeks the content of these letters will be up to the student, while other weeks I will ask them to focus on our current lessons.

Writing
   We will continue gathering ideas for our personal narratives. We will also continue to write narratives from our lists. This week we will spend time learning about our "writer's voice". Our focus will be on writing like story tellers and making our narratives come alive.

Math
   We have two more lessons in our place value unit and then we will take our first test. We will learn how to order numbers and we will learn how to make an organized list to help us answer word problems. On Wednesday, the students will take their first unit test. This test will come home with a grade. It will need to be signed by a parent and returned to school next week. Specific dates will be attached to the graded test.
   On Thursday, we will begin our next unit on addition. This unit includes rounding, estimation, and adding with regrouping.

Social Studies
    We are almost done with our globes! We will add the continents this week and label the oceans. We will also complete our map study unit by working on a landform dictionary.

Science
   This week we will begin our first Science unit on Plant Growth and Development. We will begin by examining a bean seed and learning how to make scientific observations. I will also send home a seed chart for students to collect seeds of different sizes and colors. This is optional, not homework.

Although this is a 5 day week I will not be in school Tuesday morning or Wednesday. I am running a training session for some new teacher on Tuesday morning. I will be teaching them how to use Star Lab (one of my favorite units). On Wednesday I will attend a full-day district Science meeting. I will have access to my email both days!

A few photos from our week:

Thank you to our Mystery Reader this week, Mr. Morse.