Fourth Quarter Here We Come!!

                                                                                                                March 16, 2015

Dear Parents,

St. Patrick’s Day and the first day of spring, oh my!!  It’s crazy how fast time is flying by!!  During our weekly planning session on Saturday, Mrs. Neal and myself sketched out the standards to be covered in this fourth and final quarter.  Your 2nd grader will be a 3rd grader before you know it!!

Math
We continued our work with mental math strategies, working with the operation of subtraction.  Students were able to apply much of what they learned the prior week when we worked on mental math strategies with addition.  Students worked on strategies for subtracting ones or tens from a 2-digit number, subtracting ones, tens, or hundreds from a 3-digit number, subtracting two 2-digit numbers, and subtracting a number close to 100 from hundreds.  For all these strategies students got a lot of practice breaking down (decomposing) numbers into numbers that are easier to subtract.  I must say that students are getting quite good with their mental strategies.

Mon.	IXL H.9 Subtraction Word Problems Up to 2-digits
Tues.	IXL R.8 Interpret Pictographs
Wed.	IXL R.9 Create Pictographs
Thurs.	IXL R.3 Interpret Bar Graphs

Writing
Our work in sentence fluency brought about some interesting writing this week.  Sentence fluency means students are writing pieces with sentences of different lengths, different beginnings, a variety of sentence types, and with a smooth flow.  When students are strong in sentence fluency their writing just flows and is easy and interesting to read.

Students participated in an activity in which they were given  a topic and rolled a die to determine how many words would be in each sentence.  We did the first topic as a class and then the following day students worked with a partner on different topics. Students did an amazing job with this activity.  I can't wait to see how our work in sentence fluency transfers into student writing. .

Here is what the students of Room 5 put together as a class.  

Fire Drill

Beep, beep it's a fire drill!  Get outside quickly to the playground! Fire drill!!  Get outside now!!  Ahhhh!

Projects

We continued learning about landforms and bodies of water through completing our notetakers.  Students practiced the vocabulary through playing an "I have...Who has?" game focused on the landforms and bodies of water and their definitions.

Students also used their knowledge about landforms and bodies of water to create models of 5 landforms and 5 bodies of water in clay.  Students worked hard designing, creating, and labeling their models.

Students will be working on their projects over the next couple of weeks.  They will be presenting their projects on April 2nd from 2:30- 3:30 P.M.  Mark you calendars and join us to learn more about landforms and bodies of water around the world.

Language
In language we finished our work with compound sentences and reviewed plural nouns.  Students were assessed on both skills.

Wishing you a wonderful St. Patrick's Day and a Happy Spring.

Sincerely,
Anne Bloomfield

Here's the reading information from Mrs. Jackson...

March 16-19

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Every week it seems that there is something special to celebrate.  

The next couple of weeks we will spend some time on the following two standards-determining the central message, moral or lesson of fables and folktales and acknowledging differences in points of views of characters including by speaking in a different voice for each character when reading dialogue aloud.  We will be combining these two goals by spending time this week reading fables in a Reader’s Theater fashion.  I imagine that we will greatly enjoy practicing reading with different voices.  

In our Guided Reading groups, we will be focusing on acknowledging how characters feel differently about the same events as well as the use of word choice to enhance meaning in a story. We are learning that meaning can be portrayed through text, illustrations or dialogue and how this is done in a variety of manners with a specific focus on dialogue as it relates to character.  

We will be bringing home new chapter books this week and some groups will have questions to answer as well.  We will also be studying a new word family-the “ow” family this week.  

During our independent work time we are finishing our 5 paragraph animal reports, so these should be up in the hall when you come to visit during conferences.

Mrs. Bloomfield and I have decided to conference jointly with all of our families again just like in the fall.  I look forward to meeting with you soon!  

Have a great week!