I hope everyone had a wonderful long weekend! We got a lot of snow on Monday! Stryker loved frolicking in the snow. Hopefully all of you got out to play outside too.
Anyways, we have a busy week ahead of us. We are wrapping up two-step word problems and we will begin our measurement unit. The first portion of the unit will focus on telling time. We will begin with a review of the days of the week, months of the year and AM vs. PM. Then we will move to telling time to the hour, half hour and quarter hour. The next step will be telling time to the minute. The final portion of our unit will cover elapsed time. Students will be given a situation in a word problem format and they will have to manipulate time in the future and in the past. The main method of teaching this will use a number line. For example, if students are asked to move ahead an hour and 35 minutes in time, they will find the current time on a number-line and jump ahead one hour, then 30 minutes and then 5 minutes to find the final time. I will provide examples in our newsletter when we get closer to that portion of the unit.
We will continue with text features with a focus on domain specific words in Literacy. A domain specific word is a word that is special to the text. Without an understanding of the domain specific word, one would not be able to comprehend the text completely. We will also review other text features such as captions, graphs, charts, photographs etc. Students will have to be able to successfully reference the text features to gather more information from the text. We will primarily be using non-fiction texts that address our ecosystem and habitat science unit.
Room 2 would like to congratulate John for being our Star Student for the second time. Not only is John, kind, sweet and respectful but he has been working incredibly hard lately and his efforts really showed in a recent round of testing. Congratulations John, Room 2 is incredibly proud of your academic success.
Now that there is snow on the playground, students are allowed to bring snow gear to school for recess. If a student has a hat, gloves, snow pants, an appropriate jacket and boots, they are allowed to play in the snow at recess. If a student does not have all of the items mentioned, they are not allowed to play in the snow. If you send items to school, please put them in a bag with your student’s name on it. I would also suggest writing your student’s name on all of the items since they often get misplaced in between recess and lunch.
Please continue sending in Box Tops! We are in the lead for the contest. Next month is the final month. If we stay in the lead, we will win a pizza party!
I would like to keep Valentine’s Day small in my room. I will send home a letter with the proper spelling of everyone in the room. We will decorate bags to collect our cards in class. My plan is to have the kids exchange cards, play a Bingo game and have a tiny snack. I will be in touch with my room mom’s to plan out the small snack. The whole celebration will only take about an hour.
March 2nd is Read Across America day. To celebrate, I would like to invite parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles or another special person in our students’ lives in to be a guest reader. If you are interested, please contact me to set up a time and a day. It does not have to be on the 2nd.
Stay warm,
Miss Pantalena