Mrs. Van Gorder’s Weekly News October Check out our class website! Math- Going home today are addition math flash cards. Please practice them with our child on a regular basis. A great way to work toward fact fluency is to create a my pile/your pile sort as you go through cards. Your child keeps the facts they know quickly, and you keep the facts they need to use a strategy to solve. That way, you can work on that pile that needs the most drill and practice. We continue to take 2 minute timed sprints to assess how our fact fluency is building. Please check their folders for sprints and exit tickets to see what we are working on. We focused on learning double facts and double facts +1 more as a strategy to solve ie: , , , etc. We examined the addition chart and searched for patterns as they count on by 1 ore to find the next total. Reading- In reading groups we focused on fluency making our reading sound the way we talk. We used book marks that have pictures to match each long and short vowel sound as a reminder that if a word doesn't make sense when you sound it out to change the vowel sound. Also, keep looking for picture clues to solve unknown words. Writing- In writing this week we did a story museum, where we took some time to read each others work. We learned about talking marks (quotation marks) used when characters are speaking. We applied it to characters in our own writing. We brought characters to life by adding feeling words to our writing as well. We reinforced using movement marks, speech bubbles and thought bubbles in our illustrations. Word Study- We learned about the following word families: it, ot, ut. We made words by placing a letter/letters in front of the spelling pattern ie: pit, sit, fit, pot, hot, got, nut, but, shut. We took a close look at the way letters look and sorted them. We came with ideas such as tall letters, letters with circles, humps, straight lines, curvy lines etc. We read our last Kevin Henkes book Wemberly Worried. On youtube.com you can find videos of famous people reading his stories. Our handwriting letters of the week were: e,z. Word wall words of the week: look, his, sat, went, be, not. We labeled things around the room, so we know how to spell them in our own writing and, it promotes labeling in our own writing. We learned to add an s to the end of a word to mean more than one. Science- This week we received 8 Painted Lady Caterpillars from our science kit. We observed their size, shape, color and movement as we wrote and drew pictures about what we saw. We learned about different animal bones in Scholastic News. Scholastic Orders- I f you wish to purchase books from scholastic, please order online. The flyers will come home for you to browse and then you may purchase by using our class activation code NZW9J on the scholastic website: scholastic.com/readingclub. Please submit your order by Friday, 11/20. You will need to create an account in order to do this. Social Studies - We learned about what it means to be a good citizen in our Social Studies Weekly article. We did some extension writing by recording 2 ways that you are a good citizen. Additional Notes - Reminder, we have a 2 hour early release on Tuesday, 11/2. Please be sure to read and send back your child’s book buddy everyday. Be sure to check the website for pictures taken each week. They have been recently updated. You can right click on pictures to save them. We had a great Halloween celebrartion! Thank you to all who helped out!