Weekly News (Mar. 29-Apr. 1)

It was great so see the children back at school this week! I hope everyone had a great spring break!

Math
This week in math we learned about coins as the the students explored the penny and the nickel. We talked about the value of each coin and used magnifying glasses to take a closer look at each coin's unique features. We watched a video about the coins and recorded some of our observations as well.

We also learned about 3-D shapes this week and compared them with the 2-D shapes we have learned. It was great to listen to the students as they tried to explain the difference between 2-D and 3-D shapes. Their comments were fantastic!

"2-D shapes are flat."

"3-D shapes are tall. They pop out at you."

"You can see some 2-D shapes on the bottom or top of a 3-D shape."
"You can hold a 3-D shape."

We talked about the different features of the following shapes: sphere, cone, cube, rectangular prism, and cylinder, and we practiced sorting these shapes using our interactive white board. We also sorted the shapes that were brought in for our Shape Museum! Thank you to everyone who sent in items for our museum. We will send them home next week!

Reading Workshop
We continued to explore the exciting and fun world of poetry this week! We learned that poets often use rhyming words to help us read, remember and enjoy poetry. We created lists of rhyming words together as a class and learned that rhyming words have the same ending sound. We also noticed that sometimes words that rhyme may not look the same at the end. We read the poem Five Little Monsters and highlighted the rhyming pairs, and then students worked together with a partner to find rhyming words in their poetry folders.

The students also learned about some special tricks, or devices, that poets use as they play with words to help create sound and give rhythm or musicality to the poem. We learned how poets use repetition and onomatopoeia (sound words) to help us visualize the poem and better understand its meaning.

Writing Workshop
The students had fun sharing about their spring break adventures during turn-and-talk time and wrote about what they did over break. It sounded like everyone had a fun and relaxing spring vacation!

Guided Reading and Centers
The children were excited to get new books during our guided reading time this week. When students were not working with me at the reading table, they rotated through several centers throughout the week. They practiced using letter beads to make sight words and simple sentences. They also practiced sorting words with either short /a/ patterns (-at, -an, -am) or words with beginning digraphs (sh, ch, th). They explored the book collections on the Unite for Literacy website and learned about word families at Starfall.com. Check out these great websites by clicking the images below!

Thanks for reading!

Have a great weekend!