"Fall" Into our Week

Reader's Workshop:
This week we will be reading Angela Johnson's "Julius," a fantasy story about a Pig from Alaska who teaches Maya and her family important lessons about fun and sharing. Our comprehension skill focus is Fantasy and Realism. During the week students will learn that authors sometimes use fantasy, or make-believe details, to make a story interesting or funny.

Writer's Workshop:
For the remainder of the nine weeks we will continue our focus on the narrative writing genre. This week students will publish their stories inspired by Cynthia Rylant's "The Relatives Came."

Math Investigations:
This week we will continue our focus on counting using several different activities. In Guess My Number students will be given clues and use the number line to correctly name the number being described. Students will also be introduced to the hundreds chart and shown how it can be used as a tool in addition situations. In Today's Number students will explore how to use addition sentences to express a given number. Students will continue to explore the clock moving toward telling time to the quarter hour.

Science Workshop:
This week students will explore how we use our five senses to make observations.

Spelling Words:
every, about, again, other, give, when, went, jump, much, just, then, stop, off, frog, from

A Peek at our Week

Reading:
This week we focused on story structure. We learned that all stories have a beginning, middle, and an end. This week and next week we will be reading Dav Pilkey’s Dragon Gets By, a fantasy story about a dragon who’s shopping trip to the food store becomes an adventure.

Writing:
This week we continued working on narrative writing. Students are finishing up a narrative piece inspired by Cynthia Rylant’s The Relative’s Came.

Math:
Students used pattern blocks and discovered that there are smaller shapes hidden inside of larger ones. They also used cubes to find many different way to add to numbers to make 10.

A Peek at Our Week

Reading: Reader’s Workshop This week we're learning about different components of the workshop such as a read-aloud, independent reading, and shared reading. We also learned strategies that good readers use before, during, and after reading.

Writing: Writer’s Workshop This week we discovered that we all have stories to tell. In their writing binders students have completed several story boards and have even written the first paragraph of a narrative piece!

Math: Time to the Hour & Half-hour Students learned that an analog clock has hour and minute hands, while a digital clock only has numbers. Students have mastered telling time to the hour and are working on telling time to the hour.

Supply List

Supply List
Please supply your student with the following items and label them with his or her name. Please be aware that supplies need to be replenished as needed.

	No. 2 yellow wooden pencils (no decorations)
	2 packages of wide ruled notebook paper
	1 box of tissues
	1 bottle of hand sanitizer
	1 bottle of liquid soap
	Crayons (16 or 24 count)
	3 composition notebooks
	2 plastic pocket folders
	4 glue sticks
	1 package of erasers
	1 school supply box
	1 box of Ziploc baggies (large or small)
	1 pair of scissors
	Additional supplies requested:
	1 package copy paper
	1 container disinfectant wipes
	1 1.5” 3 ring binder (any color other than black)

Instructional Focus

Math: Putting Together and Taking Apart

This week we will continue working on developing an understanding of base-ten numeration systems and place value concepts. We are studying word problems and learning the clue words that tell us if we should add or subtract.

Reading

This week we are continuing Theme 3 Around Town: Neighborhood and Community. Our story this week is Big Bushy Mustache. In this story Ricky wants to look more like his father so borrows part of a costume from school. After he loses it on his way home he learns a lesson about responsibility.

Our comprehension skill this week is problem solving and our comprehension strategy is predict/infer.

Phonics:

We will be working on· vowel pairs ow, ou and ways to decode these words in our reading such as: growling, loudest, shower, and thousand. We will also be working on suffixes -ly and -ful as in the words loudly, painful, lonely, graceful and quickly.

Grammar: Common Nouns

This week we will be working on one and more than one and when to just add -s or -es.

Sight Words

New words: family, children, school, behind, story

Review words: family, children, school, behind, story, eyes, soldier, kind, floor, very, straight

Writing: Functional

We will continue working on functional writing. Functional writing is a "how to" paper giving someone step by step directions on how to do something. We will be focusing on how to make a snowman this week and writing out the steps.

Science: Human Body

This week we will begin looking at the human body and how it works. We will be looking at our muscles and why they are important as well as other parts of our bodies.

Spelling Words

Spelling: Study these words at home. The test will be on Friday. Along with the spelling test, your child will be given 2 dictated sentences, which he/she will need to write. I am looking for words to be spelled correctly, as well as proper use of capitalization and punctuation.

1. family
2. children
3. school
   
4. behind
5. story
6. town
7. house
8. sour
9. frown
10. clown
11. found
12. mouse
13. could
14. should
15. around

This Week's Instructional Focus

Math

We will continue our investigation into shapes. During this unit we will look at identifying shapes by various attributes. We will also compose and decompose two and three-dimensional shapes as well as describe spatial and numerical relationships found among shapes. While students will explore different shapes in this unit the underlying message is for them to understand the different situations where they can use repeated addition. Please continue to work with your child at home on their basic addition facts. Our timed, 3-minute, practice addition drills will continue until Thanksgiving.

Reading: Fables

This week we will focus on different fables. A fable is a short story that teaches a moral, or lesson. The characters in fables are often animals that act and talk like humans.

Phonics: Continued Review

· Long vowels: when a vowel is long it says it name.

· Short vowels: when a vowel is short it makes the vowel’s sound.

· Two sounds for g: hard g (/g/ in gem) and soft g (/j/j in germ).

· Two sounds for c: hard c (/k/ as in camping) and soft c (/s/ as in city).

· Double consonants: understanding that a double consonant stands for a single sound

Grammar: Revising Stringy Sentences

This week we will review the structure of a sentence. Please remind your child that a sentence is a group of words that tells what someone or something does or ends. Sentences begin with capital letters and end with a punctuation mark. Children often use stringy sentences in their writing; a sentence that has too many ands. My goal is to help them learn how to make their writing more concise by learning how to rewrite their own stringy sentences.

Spelling: Study these words at home. The test will be on Friday. Along with the spelling test, your child will be given 2 dictated sentences, which he/she will need to write. We are looking for words to be spelled correctly, as well as proper use of capitalization and punctuation.

animal, were, people, said, before, neck, lake, sick, ask, lick, pack, woke, kick, lock, poke

Writing: Narrative

We will continue looking at narrative writing until Thanksgiving. This week we will finish our story about a time when we were scared.

Science: Properties of Matter

In science we will begin exploring the properties of matter. This week we will look at the transformative property of matter.