WEEK of MARCH 11th

READING:We are reading the story  "Life in the Ice". We are working on vocabulary, story structure, comprehension, text features and main ideas and supporting details. The students are learning to look for clues in stories to find different elements in a story. We are also doing the same skills in our individual reading groups! We are working on nonfiction features in a text and we are starting to work on nonfiction book reports! They are going to share their information in poster format that they are working on during their center time. 

WRITING:

We are currently working on compound words and continuing to write creative stories. We creating  some awesome writing in our journals and we are exciting to do so many writing projects! We are currently working on our own versions of the popular "DOGZILLA" story.  We continue to work on writing Weekend Reports every Monday and Squiggles every Wednesday. We are focusing on writing a complete sentence with a capital letter, a complete thought, and an endmark. We are also learning to use graphic organizers to help with our prewrites. With every sentence we write, we try to think of one good detail sentence to add to our stories. The kids will be winning Squiggle Puppy in their journal writing...We look for GREAT details, CORRECT capitalization and punctuation, and a great story! :)

SPELLING: 

There is no spelling test this week....words will come out Thursday for next Wednesday's test (March 20th)

If you're on a challenge list... make sure you check your agenda for the word list. All word lists are posted weekly in the agenda.

MATH:
We are doing lots of practice with multiplication facts and fact extensions. The students are learning about the Turn-around-Rule (Commutative Property) and lots of ways to solve multiplication problems. They are practicing with games and using MULTIPLICATION.COM as a great tool to practice their facts. The students are still working on HOME MATH practice packets and earning their weekly MATH BUCKS! Please help your son/daughter study at least 15 minutes nightly with their facts. They are learning about the relationship of multiplication to repeated addition and division to repeated subtraction. We are also learning how to make multiplication arrays. The students are skip counting and finding many patterns in their multiplication facts.  Continue to watch for Homelinks to come home in the homework folder. A study packet will be coming home in the next week or so to work on these skills before CH 7 Multiplication test. We will then move on to FRACTIONS!

SCIENCE:

We are studying forces and motion! The kids are learning all about force, motion, gravity, speed, work, and weight. We will be doing a variety of experiments to test gravity and motion...along with learning about simple machines. Look for a test over forces and motion before spring break next week. There will be a small study packet and they may use their books to show what they know!!!!

HANDWRITING:

We are currently working on practicing our lower and upper letters in cursive! They are doing great! They really want to write everything in cursive! We are working hard to form all of our letters correctly! Especially our tow truck letters and m's and n's!!!!Keep practicing and check out the link for Handwriting Without Tears for helpful hints and practice tips. Click Here.