Unit 2 Week 4 Preview

Continuing our exploration of families and neighbors, we ask the question: what is a home? Our oral vocabulary words are collapse, company, construct, entire, and material. Our high-frequency focus words are again, could, make, one, then, three. Our grammar rule will be proper nouns and capitalization. In phonics and spelling we will tackle the complicated idea of the open-syllable long-vowel spelling beginning with 'long-a'.

Reminders:

Every year Room 11 has the tradition of electing a class president. This supports the government portion of our Social Science standards. Those students interested in running for Room 11 Class President 2014-15 will work on a speech at home to be delivered to the class on November 3, 2015. Speeches will be filmed using chroma key technology and saved to flash drives.

Students who would like to have their videos edited, will make sure they are not wearing any shade of green in any part of their outfit.

On this day we will also try to film our expert interviews. Those students wanting their interviews to be edited will also need to remember not to wear green on that Monday. Make sure to practice these and these questions to improve oral fluency.

Forty-Fourth Day of School

We practiced inflectional endings on verbs with long and short vowels (hop, hopping, hopped; hope, hoping, hoped). 

We will take Chapter 2 Math Test either tomorrow or Monday.

Eleventh Day of School

Today we listened to the story The Princess and the Pea. We discussed the characteristics of the genre of fairy tale. We discussed the 5 oral vocabulary words. Tomorrow we will retell the story using those  words. We will use this same process every week to practice retelling, use new oral vocabulary, and practice listening and speaking skills.

Yesterday we completed the "thinking" (brainstorming/idea collecting) portion of the writing process (CCSS 1.W.3). In addition to the ideas which cover our yellow writing folders and the list of memorable moments which we practice telling with our parents at home, we also made categorized lists of topics which we can refer to in our writing folders. Having these resources will help ensure that we will always have a cache of ideas from which to draw for inspiration. Today we began the planning portion. The planning portion steps of the writing process involves:

1. Touching and talking
2. Drawing and labeling

Our first step today was to touch (the pages) as we told our story to a partner. We listened for a beginning (which answers the questions: who, where, and when?) a middle (which tells what happened) and an end (which may tell what happened next and may indicate a change of emotional state).

Tomorrow we will begin the drawing and labeling stage.

In addition to your child's Math homework, you should find a Reading Log which has your child's number and the first due date of September 30th. As discussed at Back-to-School, the Reading Log may be completed in a parent's hand and should be signed by a parent at the bottom.

Composite Reading scores, and raw spelling scores are available in the classroom to interested parents. 

Third Day of School

Today we continued letter formation and letter study and well as work on our Unit Projects. We also took our first spelling inventory.

In Math we worked in our Math Journals on this question:

Phillip had a 21 piece puzzle in a box. When he dumped the box out, he counted only 16 pieces. How many pieces were missing? Make a model for your solution and write a math sentence.

The yellow writing folders have already started to come in and look great so far. Only 3 students are missing their emergency information.

Reminder: Back-to-School Night is on Tuesday at 5:30. Information will be presented this evening that will not be repeated at any other time this year. Please make a point to have an adult representative present from your family.

Tomorrow we will take our first Writing assessment.