Friday, December 11^th

Dear Parents,

We had a great week!  Students wrote informational writing pieces about paleontologists and studied their personal spelling words during our literacy block.  We are continuing to read in small groups focusing on comprehension and answering questions using evidence from the text. I have all the kids go back and use direct texts to answer questions. Please try this at home while reading with your child. Hopefully you and your child are enjoying Reading Plus. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about that.

We are working on telling time to the minute and solving elapsed time problems in math.  Please continue to support your child with telling time.  Elapsed time is a tricky concept and practice is extremely helpful.  Students will continue to complete multiplication and division Math Dash quizzes throughout the school year.  Regular math fact practice should continue to be part of your child’s nightly homework routine. 

In social studies, students are working in small groups to become experts about one region of the United States.  They will complete an informational poster about their region and will share their work with the class next week.  We will have our final assessment for this unit of study next Thursday.

We also completed an Hour of Code activity this week!  Hour of Code is a one-hour introduction to computer science.  It is designed to give students around the world a positive coding experience to show that anyone can learn the basics.  We used activities on the site https://code.org/learn  Students were engaged and excited about their work. We hope to complete other coding activities later in the school year.

I hope to see you at our winter party on Friday, December 18^th from 1:30 to 2:30.  Please take a moment to sign up to help if you can.  Thank you!

www.SignUpGenius.com/go/60B0B4BAFAB2DA31-mrs1

Have a fantastic weekend. 

Sincerely,

Aisha Galt

Friday, December 4^th

Dear Families,

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break with your family. It's hard to believe that in just two short weeks we will be on winter break! This week has flown by and we have accomplished so much. 

Congratulations to our class for winning the Silver Can Award for the school food drive school contest. We did not win the pizza party, but our class brought in the second highest number of food times. Thank you for helping us achieve this goal!!

Language Arts

Reading: Reading groups continue to work on short, non-fiction pieces. We are working on comprehension skills and using the text to confirm our understanding. The kids are getting really good at going back into the text to support their ideas as they read. 

Writing: We started a new writing unit this week, which will carry us most of the way through January. We are working on Informative/Explanatory writing. During this unit we will work on research skills and using text to support our writing. Students will develop a topic by grouping related information and expanding the topic with facts, definitions and details. 

Spelling/Word Work: We have been working on contractions and homophones during our word work. We will continue to explore and practice these two topics through the rest of the month. The last week before winter break your child will have another spelling test and bring home a new word list to work on. 

Math

This week we started Unit 3- Measurement, Time and Graphs. In this unit your child will explore measurement with US Customary units and Metric units, use data to create and read graphs and use number lines to represent time intervals. We hope to complete this unit before we leave for winter break. This week's focus was on measurement; next week we will work on telling time and understanding elapsed time; we will finish up with graphing before the assessment. Please support your child by talking about measurement when cooking and at the store, as well as telling time throughout the day.  Thank you!

Social Studies

Our new Social Studies unit is about the Regions of the United States. Students are learning what a region is and exploring the 5 regions of the US (West, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast and Northeast). They are very excited about this unit and have enjoyed sharing about their travels and family members who live in various regions of the US. 

Mark Your Calendars

Friday, December 18- Holiday concert and all school sing along. Stay tuned for the time. 

Friday, December 18- Winter classroom party 1:30-2:30 - be on the lookout for an email from our room mom about how you can help with the party. 

Have a wonderful weekend. 

Sincerely,

Aisha Galt