October 15-18, 2013

Blog Update for the week of: October 15-18, 2013

Reminders:

*Please remember to send a healthy snack every day.  Snack time is @ 9:30am.

*Make sure your child wears tennis shoes every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday for PE.

*Library day is Thursday.

Dates to remember:

October 14:  Student Holiday

October 18:  Hoot Family Picnic

October 21 – 25: Red Ribbon Week

October 30:  Early Release Day

November 2:  Harvest Festival

November 13:  Family Skate Night

November 27-29:  Thanksgiving Holidays

December 4:  Early Release Day

December 5:  Family Art Night

December 9-13:  Book Fair

December 23:  Winter Break Begins

Math:   Students will continue to develop their conceptual understanding of the relationships between the numbers 1-10.  Students will practice and develop an understanding of how to compose and decompose numbers 0 – 120 using concrete and pictorial representations. Students will count up and back between 1 and 120.  Students will continue to develop their ability to conceptualize a number as being made up of two or more parts and their understanding of the part-part-whole model and related number relationships. They will also continue to explore, in this unit and throughout the year, a variety of addition/subtraction problem situations including joining, separating, part-part-whole, and comparing, with different unknowns: result/change/start, or part/whole or difference, in order to develop an understanding of the operations of addition and subtraction. Sums and differences are limited to 20. Students will generate a problem solving situation from a given number sentence and use concrete and pictorial models to solve problems using addition and subtraction with whole numbers to 20.

Reading Workshop:  This week in reading workshop we will continue reading and studying nonfiction/expository texts.  This week our focus will be on reading nonfiction books about spiders and using our reading time to research and learn facts that we don’t already know about them.  This unit will extend into writing workshop too.  We will also spend some time on comparing and contrasting fiction vs. nonfiction books on spiders.  This is a fun unit, and the kids always have fun researching with this unit!  Be sure to ask your child what they learned this week about spiders!

Writing Workshop:  During the next several weeks in Writer’s Workshop, we will be learning how to write expository texts to communicate ideas and information that we are learning.  Our learning this week will focus on spiders and begin with KWL charts in which we will write down facts that we already “know”; then write down questions that we “want to know”; conclude with an informative writing that communicates what we have learned about spiders. Please be watching for our work to begin filling the halls this week as our new unit of study unfolds.

Social Studies:  This week, we will begin our unit on national symbols and their importance. We will learn and write about the Liberty Bell, the United States Flag, and our National Anthem.  Next week we will finish this unit and it will be displayed in our hallway!.

Habit #4:  Think Win-Win When learning about this habit, we will learn how we can balance the courage of getting what we want with the consideration of others want.