​Academic Update – November and December 2017

Reading

Students will continue to work in their guided reading groups. In these groups, students are reading books that are at their instructional level. They work on individual reading goals and strategies. Guided reading groups continue throughout the year but are fluid, so students may be moving in and out of groups based on their needs. Over the past two weeks, most groups focused on the comprehension strategy of retelling a story. Once your child has read a book, they should be able to easily retell the story.  We will be doing running records in the next couple of weeks.  We know we will see great growth! 

Writing

Our main focus for the next week in writing will be using what we have learned and writing an independent personal narrative.  We are expecting a question lead (answering who, where, when), transition words (first, then, next) and an ending.  We are also focusing on conventions of writing – punctuation and capital letters and spelling high frequency words correctly!

After the independent piece we will begin the unit on procedural writing.   We will expect students to write a detailed “how-to” piece.  For example, how to make a snowman.

Word Work

     We will continue to add words to our word wall each week.  Some of these words are homophones, some have –ed/-ing suffixes and others are high frequency. 

Grammar/Phonics

      We will continue to work with nouns (common and proper).  We have started working with verbs and adjectives.  We are expecting to see more adjectives in their writing.  We have been working on blends; for example, s blends (st, sm, sn, sp, etc), r blends (fr, br, tr) and l blends (fl, bl, gl, etc).  Students should know that when they see these letters together it makes one sound.  We will continue to work on short and long vowels and how to make vowels long (silent e, 2 vowels go walking, etc).  We will introduce commas for dates and a list and abbreviations for months.    

Math

We are finishing up our unit on Numbers. Students should be able to skip count in a variety of ways (by 2’s starting at 10, by 10’s starting at 6, by 5’s forward to 50 and back from 50, etc.).   They should be able to tell if a number is odd or even.  And they should be able to compare and order numbers (up to 20).  This unit will be revisited throughout the year. 

During the next 2 months we will be extending and creating repeating patterns.  We will also compare and construct 2-D and 3-D shapes. 

During out daily calendar we discuss days of the week, months of the year, how to read the date, know the day before and after and the date 1 week ago or in one week. 

Important Dates to Remember…

Thursday, November 13^rd – no school

Thursday, November 16^th – Zumba - $2

Monday, November 20th – report cards go home

Thursday, November 23 – hot lunch for December due

Thursday, November 23 (evening) and Friday, November 24 (morning) – parent teacher interviews

Friday, November 24 – NO school for students

Thursday, December 14 – Christmas concert (times to be announced)

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