Reading:
Just For You - Theme 2: Helping Hands
In the second reading theme of the year, children see how people work together to accomplish their goals. They learn that teamwork is not only helpful but can also be fun. For the next five weeks, you may want review the importance of “Helping Hands” with your child after each week’s story.
Your child is reading The Enormous Turnip by Alexei Tolstoy. In this Russian folktale, a man plants a turnip that grows so large he can’t pull it out of the ground. He calls on other people and animals to pull up the turnip.
Please encourage your child to read The Enormous Turnip over the weekend. Vocabulary Power preceeds the story.
Focus Skill: Sequence
Vocabulary Power:
enormous-very large
granddaughter-a daughter of one’s son or daughter grew-became larger
planted-put in the ground to grow
strong-powerful
turnip-a kind of root vegetable
School-Home Connection: You might enjoy reading these folktales with your child: Peter and the Wolf retold by Michele Lemieux; The Baker’s Dozen by Heather Forest; The Little Red Hen by Byron Barton
Guided Reading:
This week we started working in small groups for guided reading instruction. To begin, students learned a board game called "The Main Idea". During this game, students read a passage and chose which answer best describes the main idea of the passage. Along with improving reading skills, this game also teaches students how to roll a die, turn taking, encouraging one another and patience. In this day and age of computer games, many students have not had exposure to board games. Board games are an excellent resource to develop the life skills needed for team work and group interaction. When the weather starts to get colder and you are looking for indoor activities, you may want to encourage your child to pull out a board game. What a great family activity!
Writing:
Unit of Study: Paragraphs
We have started our lessons about developing a paragraph using proper form. Students are learning that a paragraph has a topic sentence, supporting reasons, details and an ending sentence. Students will have numerous opportunities to write paragraphs throughout this unit.
Science:
This week we discussed the terms: evaporation, condensation, precipitation and accumulation. Your child learned a song that reviews the water cycle. I'm sure you will enjoy the catchy tune if you ask your child to sing it for you. We also set up experiments to observe evaporation and condensation. Students learned that heat speeds up the process of evaporation. They also learned that during condensation,water vapor from the air turns it into water droplets on a cold surface. You may enjoy reading the water cycle books that I posted for you and your child on the Pearson link in the right hand column of this blog.
Citizenship: Conflict Resolution - Talk It Out
For the last 4 weeks, we have been working on the Talk It Out program during citizenship time. We have learned that everyone gets upset sometime and that we can handle our feelings in ways that hurt others or help solve the problem. We have learned to identify what conflicts are, appropriate ways to cool down at school when involved in a conflict, using "I" messages to help solve conflicts (I feel __________ when you _______ because) and what it looks like to be a good listener when someone comes to talk to you to try to resolve a conflict. This week we will review these steps and then the week of the 18th, we'll talk about finding solutions that are acceptable to the people in the conflict.
Parent Volunteers Needed:
If you would like to volunteer for Math Explorations on the following dates (12:30-1:30), please send me an email.
October 27
November 15
November 22
November 29
December 3
January 10
February 4
February 18
April 13
