Weeks 3 & 4

IMPORTANT!!!  The shuttle bus for parent pick-up and drop-off students ONLY starts Monday.  If you are going to participate in the FREE shuttle bus, please let me know either through an email or a note to me on Monday.  Remember the drop-off time is 8:45 and the pick-up time is 4:10 at Sierra Middle School.  

Weeks 3 and 4 were fun and we learned a lot.  In cursive handwriting, we learned how to form the letters t, p, l, e, and f.  We wrote about how we could make the world a more beautiful place, our hopes/dreams, a memory with our sister/brother, our likes/dislikes/passions, and our connections.  Each student wrote a letter to a grandparent(s) because we want to get to know our grandparents better.  We invited them to "Grandparent Tea" on Friday, September 9th from 9:05 - 10:00.  Hope to see you there!  This week we started Seeing R.E.D (Revising and Editing Daily).  Our goal is to capitalize the beginning of sentences and make sure every sentence has ending punctuation. 

 

We read Grandfather's Journey which is about Allen Say's grandfather's journey to the United States.  Our class is in guided reading groups and we are practicing making connections.  We have Mrs. Zamora in our room to help us read too.  From Daybook, we have been making connections with people, hopes/dreams, and images.  Our parent volunteers are reading with us and helping us make connections too. 

We have been continuing our place value work in math.  Number patterns in math have been a bit tricky for us especially if we are counting by 10's or 100's and we make a new 100 or 1000 (i.e. 5, 892 and the pattern is to add 10, the next number in the pattern would be 5.902).  On Monday, we took a test on Chapter 1.  Mrs. Deba will correct the test over the weekend.  Now we are learning number bonds and how to make a 10 to help us add/subtract 2-digit numbers mentally.

We did reading and language MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) testing on the computer.  Math MAP testing will take place next week.  We began Fast ForWord last week.  It is a reading program on the computer that has reading games at a variety of levels.  We practice every day and have fun doing it! 

We started our ABC Catalog fundraiser yesterday.  Fundraiser order forms are due by September 8th.  Sell, sell, sell!!!  :)  BYE
 

Week 2

We had a fun second week of school!  Our class is learning to count money and make specific amounts in a variety of ways.  For example if the amount was $0.40, one student may put up 4 dimes and another student may use a quarter, dime, and nickel. 

 We have been learning how to write in cursive.  Last week we learned how to write the cursive c, a, d, g, and h. 

 

Daybook is teaching us reading comprehension strategies such as:  making connections, asking questions, determining importance, visualizing, making inferences, and synthesizing.  We are focusing on making connections while we read. 

 

In writing, we drew self-portraits and we wrote about ourselves.  This form of writing is called descriptive writing.

We have been learning place value.  We have gone into the thousands place.  On Friday, we learned the difference between a number and a digit.  For example a number is 2,548 and 2 is a digit within that number.  With base-ten blocks we can represent a number and we can find the value of each digit.  Like the value of the digit 2 in 2,548 is worth 2,000.  We can write numbers in standard form, word form, and expanded form.  

 

You are able to buy books from Scholastic online at www.scholastic.com/bookclubs.  If you are not already registered, please do so and use our class code GQQWY.  I have the Lucky and Arrow catalogs open until August 28th.  If you need more time, just let me know and I'll open them for a longer period of time.  Every time a parent places an order, I get a $3 coupon to buy more books for the classroom! 

First Week of School

On Monday we came to school for Open House.  We met Mrs. Deba, walked around our classroom, put away our school supplies, got our pictures taken, and got registered for school.  Tuesday was the first day of school!  We walked around the classroom so we know where everything is and we wrote about our summer break.  We even brought in an item from our summer break to help with our writing.  We learned the classroom expectations and went to art.  On Wednesday we started having quiet reading time (D.E.A.R time) after lunch.  We began reviewing place value.  Thursday we spent time learning about each other.  We also got our hard cover math books.  Today we learned how to blog!