What's Happening in Room 127? (August/September)

 August/September in Review

At the end/beginning of every month I will send out a newsletter to let you know what has been going on in Room 127, and what will be coming up.

English/Language Arts (ELA):  This month we completed our first ELA unit called "Classic Stories".  During this unit students were exposed to the classic stories of The Wind in the Willows, Mulan, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  We worked on understanding the elements of fictional narratives such as dialogue, narrations, characters, plot, and setting.  We also talked about perspective, point of view, and the themes of friendship, loyalty, hospitality, and irresponsibility.  

I have also taught students to give themselves comprehension checks as they are reading.  When students are giving themselves a comprehension check they are asking themselves what happened, who was in that part, and is it new information or does it connect to something else in the story?  If students can't answer these questions they need to go back and reread that section/chapter.  This is an extremely important skill!

In the writing portion of ELA we started to focus on opinion paragraphs.  We wrote a teacher-guided opinion paragraph together on the theme of irresponsibility from The Wind and the Willows.  While doing this we reviewed the elements of effective paragraphs (topic/closing sentences, reasons with supporting evidence, and using transition words).  We also reviewed the writing process.  Students then completed their own opinion paragraph which I will share with you at conferences.

In much of our daily work I am stressing writing in complete sentences and using correct capitalization and punctuation.

Social Studies:  We just completed our first unit on geography.  During this unit students learned:  the location of the continents and oceans, how to use cardinal/intermediate directions to describe the location of different places, ways people adapt to different environments based on geography and climate, how the Native Americans adapted to the environment long ago.  

Math:  We have been working on multiplication and division with units of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10.  To start, we worked on the conceptual understanding of multiplication and division.  We then moved into understanding the properties of multiplication.  To explore the commutative property we skip-counted the rows and columns in arrays.  We used arrays and number bonds to model the distributive property when finding the products of unfamiliar facts.  Currently we are working on two interpretations of division to help solidify students' understanding of the relationship between multiplication and division and show division as both unknown factors problems and division equations.  We are now in the last part of the unit and working with the associative property of multiplication and solving two-step word problems using multiplication and division.

Second Step:  Each week we work with a social/emotional program called Second Step.  In August/September we have been focusing on growth mindset and goal setting.  The students have been learning about what happens in their brain when they are learning a new skill.  Growth mindset is going to continue to be a focus for us throughout the school year.

Health:  In health we focused on three different areas:  cultural influences on health. when students should ask for help, and fire safety.  The purpose of these lessons were to:

• explore the differences between healthy/unhealthy influences or traditions
• recognize unhealthy situations and whom to ask for help
• recognize emergency situations involving fire and burns and know to respond appropriately.

Coming Up

Science:  We have begun our first science unit called "Environments and Living Things".

Math:  We will be wrapping up our first math unit this week.  Our next math unit is working on place value concepts through metric measurement.

Take Note:  

*Everyday students make a goal for what page they will read to in their book that evening.  We have talked about making realistic yet challenging goals.  Each child is expected to read at least 15-20 minutes a day Monday-Thursday, and at least one time over the weekend.  I monitor each child's progress with their independent reading.

Dates to Remember:

October 13 - No School
October 9, 21, 23 - Conferences