Health Center Field Trip

Thank you to our chaperones!

Hello Families! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. I was wonderful to see everyone at conferences! This will be the only blog post until after winter break. For winter break, the only homework will be an optional writing journal and to read everyday. The winter break journal should just be a couple sentences about your child's day and an illustration. I hope everyone is staying warm!

Reading: We temporarily finished our study of comprehension strategies: visualizing, making connections, questioning and predicting. We will continue to discuss the strategies we have learned and then finish the rest after break (synthesizing information, inferring and finding the main idea) We have started an exciting non fiction unit. We have discussed the differences between nonfiction and fictions, as well as, learned the features and their purposes in nonfiction (ie captions, photographs, glossary, index...) Ask your child to show you a feature in a nonfiction book. We have started non fiction book clubs also. Groups of 2-4 kids chose a non fiction theme to research and learn more about. In their groups, they discuss what they already know about the topic (their schema), any new facts, ask questions and talk about misconceptions they had. It has been a great start to the unit-excitement is high!

Writing: We have immersed ourselves in a writing friendly letters this month. The kids are doing a nice job remembering the 5 parts of a friendly letter: heading, greeting, body, closing, signature. I hope that you will notice an improvement in their TGIF Journal this week!

Math: The kids did a great job on the test last week. Thank you to all parents for supporting your kids with the "new" algorithm for math. I know that it is very different from what we learned in school, but the kids do develop a much better understanding for place value and numbers. Keep using the online Everyday Math resources for support. We are now working on Geometry. There are some difficult concepts, like line segments and parallel lines.

Social Studies: We continue to study continents and oceans. We have also begun learning about directions and grids. Ask your child to name as many continents as they can.

Other News:

*Field Trip next Tuesday to the Health Education Center. We will spend the morning learning about safety and bullying through interactive lessons and activities. We will be back in time for school lunch.

*Winter Party- Dec 22 1:00-2:00pm

*If you have not read the Tonawanda Tales from last week, I encourage you to read the front page about future district money saving possibilities in relation to our school.