November 13-17 AND 20-21

Hello Families,

It was good to see some of you for conferences on Thursday, and I look forward to seeing everybody else next week! I'm sure these next two weeks will fly by as we have an early dismissal on Friday, and then the next week there are only two school days! I hope you enjoy this extra time with your family and stay warm with this chilly weather.

Reminders/Updates

• Conferences will continue on Tuesday, if you didn't have yours already on Thursday! 
• Our new shipment of MathBoards (a dry erase board we use for math) came in, so we can send our old ones home with families! I will have them available at conferences for you to take home, but if you didn't get one or would just like another, let me know. 
• Don't forget to order Square1Art! The deadline for orders was Friday, but you can still order online this weekend :)
• There are also extra Funset Boulevard wristbands if you did not get some yet. We're still taking orders through Monday!
• This month New Directions is showing how to BE Thankful!  As a way to bring us together as a school community we are going to have an "Appreciation Station" set up for students and families to use at conferences.  At this station you will be able to write a note to someone you are thankful for in your lives. It can be someone from the school or someone from somewhere else in your lives.  Please look for the station outside the cafeteria by the 4K classroom and stop by to let someone know you are thankful for them!  
• Monday will be Day 5. Next week Monday (11/20) will be Day 4. 
• Next week Friday is an early dismissal. Students will be released at 11:30, and lunch will not be served at school. The following week students do not have school on Wednesday-Friday!

Upcoming Events

November 14: Portfolio Conferences
November 16: Funset Boulevard
November 17: Early Dismissal at 11:30
November 20: Badger Sportswear
November 22-24: NO SCHOOL
December 7: Pajama Day
December 7: Family Night

Curriculum Update

Math: This week we fixed up our mistakes on our Unit 1 tests so we can learn from them! We will continue multiplication and division in Unit 2, so your child does have more time to master these concepts. As students are building on their knowledge of multiplication and division, they will begin to look for more efficient strategies! So far this week we multiplied with 6 and 8 and found area of rectangles. If your child seems like they're struggling in math, the best thing for him/her to do at home is to practice their facts. They can copy down the facts that they're working on at school so they have a set at home. You can ask your child to say the fact and show it (with a picture, using count bys, using other known facts, or any other strategy they have). Next week, we will work more with story problems and matching equations, multiplying and dividing with 7, square numbers, and becoming more fluent with all of our facts (since we will have learned facts with 0-10!) 

Writing: We have been working on writing convincing persuasive speeches! We listened to a powerful speech from a student our age to learn what moves she did as a speaker to give a powerful, persuasive speech. Next week, we'll have a mini celebration by giving our speeches and listening to others' speeches. I'm hoping to do this through Seesaw so families will be able to see as well! We will then start petitions and work on becoming more independent writers.

Word Study: We have been working on our five closed exceptions, -olt, -ild, -ost, -ind, and -old and our "trick words" goes, pretty, and done. If you haven't turned in the Word Study packet yet, that's okay! Just turn it in next week :) We have been working to remember a capital letter at the start of a sentence and a punctuation mark at the end as well! Next week we will review all we have learned so far and take the Unit 3 test. 

Reading: This past week students enjoyed reading as many more mysteries as they could with their partners. This next week we will be staying in our mystery unit, BUT we will be reading regular fiction books with our partners. We will transferring all we learned in reading mysteries to reading ANY type of fiction! The week of Thanksgiving we will be doing our celebration. We will also do some "book stacking." This is where students will get to find ALL the books they read in this unit and stack them up and take a picture on seesaw. Be on the lookout for how many books your child has read! It should be exciting. The last day of school before break we will do a pre-assessment on Nonfiction reading to see what skills students are using as they read. After thanksgiving we will be beginning our first nonfiction reading unit! It should be so exciting!

Content: This week we did a close reading of an article to learn more about geographers and cartographers. Next week we will finish close reading the article and investigate what we know about the world by looking at different maps and globes. In particular, we will be discussing the seven continents, five oceans, and cardinal directions!


Know that you can always contact me with any questions or concerns. Have a wonderful weekend!

Best,
Jenny