*2nd quarter ends Friday, 12/16/11...Has your child achieved their individual 2nd quarter Accelerated Reading (A/R) goal??? Be sure to have them read AT LEAST 20-30 minutes a night. Have them read to you...and have them read a chapter or a page, and alternate back and forth. Ask them to retell or summarize what was read. For example...
-make inferences about the setting
-main character(s) and the character traits
-problems/solutions
-discuss figurative language
-sequence of events
-story events (beginning, middle, ending)
-make predictions
-explain author's purpose
In addition, please make sure your child is turning in their Weekly Reading Logs every MONDAY. If the blue sheet gets misplaced, you can always have YOUR CHILD record their nightly reading on any given sheet of paper, as long as you review and sign it as well. As previously mentioned, it is their responsibility, and it is a part of their reading grade.
*We've been working on our various forms of writing, writing, writing...such as letter writing, narrative writing, and next week we'll begin persuasive writing. Students have needed to increase their accuracy with capitalization, punctuation, language mechanics, etc....so we've also been working hard on those skills as well. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! :-)
*The parts of speech have been another area of focus for us...common nouns, proper nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, interjections, conjunctions, etc. Please help your child by quizzing them on these. They could really use the extra practice.
*Students practice their individual Word Study (spelling) by completing various activities from a given Tic*Tac*Toe sheet or activity sheet otherwise. They also have at-home access (under your supervision, of course) to their word lists that I've typed on www.spellingcity.com. Here there are educational games, quizzes, activities, and more that they may use to practice their words. They test and are given a NEW list approximately every 2 weeks.
*We've been reading, researching, and discussing The Lewis and Clark Expedition too. Currently, students are using various sources to create a timeline of events, beginning from the start of the expedition to when the men returned. Their resources are kept in their folders at school, and they also have access to a list of helpful websites that they access using our laptops, tubs of Kennerly library books in our classroom, journals, their textbooks, booklets, etc.
NOTE: The Lewis and Clark Timeline Project is DUE: Friday, 12/9/11.
*TIME was our recent math focus, and we'll begin CH's 6 and 7-GRAPHING on Monday. Students will be collecting and organizing data, analyzing, interpreting, and creating various graphs such as Bar and Double Bar Graphs, Pictographs, Line and Double Line Graphs, and Line Plots, etc. We'll also be learning how to find the Mean, Median, Mode, and Range...so be prepared to give your child some extra help, if needed. We'll be creating manipulatives for this, but sometimes students need extra practice when it comes to finding the Mean (average), Median (number in the middle), Mode (number that appears the most), and Range (high number minus the low one) of a set of numbers.
