Highlights a Night Early

Hello families,

I don't know where the time is going. This week has been sailing by! I'm sending out our class news a night early since I'll be out tomorrow. Here are a few highlights from our week:

We celebrated the 100th day on Monday. We read Zero the Hero, counted to 100 many times and explored 100 in different ways during math workshop. We also filled up out heart jar that day! On Tuesday we had a class celebration with iPad time. We learned about a new app, Color Therapy, and also used Kodable. It was so fun!

We read about sharks as our anchor text for writer's workshop. We learned about using comparisons to help the reader understand better and twin sentences to help elaborate on an idea. Many students are nearly finished writing their second teaching books. Some are even writing a third one already!

Wednesday was Valentine's Day. It was fun to share our notes with each other. We did some heart drawings and a word search. We also read Huggly's Valentines. It was a sweet day together.

In math we've continued practicing addition and subtraction patterns in Fact Power. We also used base ten blocks to help model groups of tens and leftovers (ones) in numbers. By modeling numbers using these hands-on tools it helped students explain why 63 is more than 36. We used this knowledge of comparing numbers and learned about the symbols that help us write comparison expressions: greater than >, lesser than <, and equal to =.

In reader's workshop I've been meeting with students individually to do our mid-year formal, summative, reading assessments. This data will be reported out on report cards next month. Throughout the year I do formative assessments to differentiate reading instruction in our day to day learning. This makes sure that each child is getting the practice he/she needs while also getting access to whole class mini-lessons on strategies all good readers use to solve unknown words, or mini-lessons to help learn about text features that help us to be better reader.

Dates to Remember:
Monday February 26 - Tuesday March 6 - Winter Break (3/5 and 3/6 are Teacher In-Service days)
Wednesday March 7 - school resumes

Have a great Friday and weekend!
❤ Mrs. Fox