 Hi Families, Thank you for your patience and flexibility with me this week as I fought an icky cold and a hoarse voice. I was home sick for a couple of days this week including Friday morning and had to reschedule a number of parent teacher conferences for next week and after Thanksgiving. Thankfully I've turned a corner and plan to be back in action on Monday. I hope students enjoyed the activities that I planned in my absence. In the spirit of the season, I want to share how thankful I am to be teaching at Barrows with such great colleagues and leaders, and to have such a wonderful class of students this year! I'm looking forward to hearing students' stories about their Thanksgiving adventures, woes, and amusements when we get back from the break. I won't be writing another Weekly Update until the beginning of December. I hope everyone has a wonderful and restful holiday! Barrows Weekly Newsletter Here is the link to the latest Starburst from Principal Gallegos. Important Upcoming Dates:
Above, students watching an old favorite of mine, Bill Nye the Science Guy, explain erosion.
Below are some highlights from the week. Community Building Students met with their 4th grade buddies in Ms. Hirtle's class on Thursday to make a craft for the Turkey Trot next week. We played some fun games of Four Corners during Morning Meeting. Students run around the room from corner to corner in hopes that their chosen corner doesn't get called out. There was an All School Assembly on Wednesday with a charming performance by the kindergarteners. Literacy We worked on our fluency and decoding with decodable stories. Students practice "relay reading" out loud to a partner (partners alternate reading sentence by sentence), choral reading in a group with me, and independent reading. Ms. Martin, the substitute, read some fun stories:
We started reading A.A. Milne's beloved classic Winnie the Pooh. The complex sentence structure and the unusual narration style are two features of the text that confused students right away and required explanation. As we get more into the story next week, my hope is students fall in love with the charming characters and playful humor of the author. Writing In writing, we worked on recognizing sentence fragments and turning them into complete sentences. We also wrote some sentences about erosion in science and wrote some sentences about our read aloud, A Fine, Fine School. While I was out, students started writing in response to prompts. We'll continue this work next week. Phonics We launched Unit 4 in Fundations which focuses on suffixes. We learned about the suffixes "-s" and "-es" and when to use them. We use "-es" for words ending in "s," "x," "z," "sh," or "ch". We learned that some words with s/es suffixes can be both plural nouns and also action verbs. For example, you can have one "boss," or multiple "bosses," or someone "bosses" you around. We also learned about comparison suffixes "-er" and "-est," but also learned that "-er" can be added to a word to mean "a person who does something." For example, a "singer" is "a person who sings." Lastly, we learned about suffixes "-ing" and "-ed" to show the tense of a verb. "-ing" means "and action is happening now" and "-ed" means "an action has already happened in the past." We'll continue learning about spelling with suffixes next week. Read more in the Fundations Home Support Packet for Unit 4! Math In Math this week we worked on modeling and adding two digit numbers without decomposing/regrouping. We played a fun new Math Game called Capture Squares to build students' fluency with sums and differences within 20. Next week I have to administer a short number sense assessment on each student. We will also begin solving word problems with 2-digit numbers. Here are the Family Support Materials for this Math unit. Science In Science we watched the Bill Nye the Science Guy episode from the 1990s on Erosion. A classic! Students tolerated the cheesy, 1990s pop culture references, learning about how the earth is always changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, due to erosion. After the video, students completed sentences using "because, but, and so" about how wind and water change Earth's landscape. Next week we'll look at some examples of real life erosion engineering solutions. Thank you for reading! Please reach out with any questions or feedback. Have a great week!
1 Comment
Zanny Perrino
11/21/2022 11:47:45 am
Charlie was talking about erosion and weathering this week so the video must have done it's job well! Leave a Reply. |
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