10/6/2017 Room 303 News

Weekly Updates and Reminders:

• Daily folders and red reading folders are to go to and from school each day.  Reading logs are to be filled out at home to log their 20 minutes of nightly reading.
• Assignment Notebooks (planners) are to be signed or initialed every evening by a parent.  Thank you for taking the time to check your child's planner.
• Math homework is checked in class together each day.  This time is spent reteaching (if necessary) and more importantly, a time for students to take ownership of their learning by asking questions if they have an incorrect answer on their homework.
• Please always email BOTH teachers if you have any questions or concerns.
• What a success our PTA Funky Fall Fun Run was! I believe Mr. Bender mentioned that our school surpassed last year's fundraising effort!  THANK YOU TO ALL THE PARENTS!  The rain stopped by the afternoon and students had a wonderful time with the entire Wixom Family!  Thank you PTA for such a fun and memorable day as well as your support for our kids!  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Math:

This week we finished Unit 1: Math Tools, Time and Multiplication.  Students will be taking the unit assessment on Monday.  I am pleased to say that we also began our Math Workshop, which begins with checking homework, our daily lesson, independent work, independent choice, as well as small group work with me. 

Social Studies:
 In Social Studies we have discussed the importance of cardinal directions as it relates to exact location.  Students enjoyed working on this concept as they navigated directions on a fun Halloween activity/page.  For example, what is Northeast from the pumpkin patch? What is located just North of the Haunted House?

Writing: 

This week the students have been writing up a storm.  We worked on our Flash Drafts- this is where the students write as much as they can about their topic.  We are then using the many strategies that we have learned thus far to polish and make our writing better.  The students will be taking this Flash Draft to the publishing stage and this will be their final draft for our personal narrative writing unit.  Their writing will be scored based on the rubric below so we are working through each piece as we make our writing our very best!

Reading: 

The students have been working hard to become great readers!  We continue to learn important strategies about how we can make sure we are understanding what we read.  We have also been learning about retelling the important parts of a story to help us with comprehension.  This week, we read the book The Can Man and applied the many different strategies we have learned so far- making predictions, giving ourselves a comprehension check, envisioning while we read, and retelling the important parts.  Ask your child about this great story.  We also finished our read aloud Stone Fox.  It had a surprising and sad ending but we have been talking about how books that make us really "feel" are often the best ones!