Week of January 29

Dear Parents –

I hope you’re enjoying your weekend.  Next week promises to be exciting with our Mini Academies and 100^th Day of School celebration. 

Here’s a look at our week ahead:

Monday (Day 2) Music and World Language

Tuesday (Day 3) World Language

Wednesday (No School)

Thursday (Day 4) Art and PE

Friday (Day 5) Library and World Language

Mini Academies

Our Mini Academies are scheduled for Monday, January 29.  Thank you to the parents who have volunteered to lead an activity.  These are always special events and the children love learning from our very talented parent community. 

100^th Day of School

Our 100^th Day of School is Friday, February 2^nd.  We have some exciting events planned to help us celebrate the day.  I’m looking forward to seeing the creative hats that the children make!  We’ll have our Hat Parade in the morning before recess.  Please remind your child to bring his or her hat to school on Thursday, February 1^st. 

PE Swim Dates

Please see the message from Mr. Fischer about our swim dates for Semester 2. 

Semester 2 Swim Dates

Reader’s Workshop

We’ve been busy reading informational books and learning how to use different text features to locate information.  We’ll begin our week reviewing how to unlock new vocabulary by using context clues.  In addition, we’ll begin working on how to summarize our reading.  We’ll practice identifying the main idea of a chapter. Throughout the week, students will be reading informational books to learn more about the topic they are writing about in our Writer’s Workshop.

Writer’s Workshop

We just finished our first informational books and students are in the process of completing a self-assessment of their writing.  With the completion of this book, we now turn our focus to our next book.  Students have identified a topic of interest and selected some books from our library and from online sources to help them learn more about their topic.  We’ll start by reading for information and identifying the important vocabulary words and information from our reading.  From there students will begin planning their new book.  They’ll start by breaking their topic into subtopics, mapping out what they already know about their topic, and then drafting their book section by section. 

Math Workshop

Our work with plane and solid figures continues this week.  We continue practicing how to use attributes to describe plane and solid figures.  Last week we introduced the vocabulary words, square corners and parallel lines.   These terms are essential in identifying and describing the plane figures we work with in class. 

Science

This week we’ll finish our work on personal hygiene by looking more closely at how to take care of our teeth.  Our week will start with a science experiment to help illustrate the effects of acid on our teeth. 

Dinner Questions

What are some nonfiction topics that interest you?  What do you know about them?

What is the topic of the book you’re writing?  What text features will you add?

What shapes do you see around our home?