September 25th Update...

Hello Parents and Students,

We have had quite an eventful week! We tried to get as much accomplished in our 2 1/2 days as we could! Please make sure you check out the calendar items that are new this week as well as looking below to see what we are currently studying in each subject area. Again, I'd like to encourage all of you to get your children to journal at home as much as possible. The children should be writing in paragraph form and should easily be able to write 5-8 sentences on a single topic. Our current writing focus is personal narratives, which means the children should be writing about a specific memory of an event that happened to them. Encourage beginning with a catchy topic sentence and ending with a closing sentence. Choose a time to review your child's journal and talk about some things he or she could improve on. Always end with a GLOW, or something you loved about your child's writing.

Phonics/Grammar: We went over singular and plural nouns and when to add -s or -es to the ending. We also reviewed the long and short e spelling patterns.

Writing: We continued with our personal narratives. This week, we used a graphic organizer to help us with our writing, then we wrote our rough drafts after watching Mrs. Wadsworth model her writing. We edited our papers and rewrote our final copies. Be on the lookout for the "persoanl narrative rubric" that will be in the blue folders. To see your child's writing, you can come and look in our hallway. We also reviewed the important components of a letter and we wrote our first letters to our pen pals at Kemp Elementary. You will find the grade your child received on this assignment in the blue folder as well, but the letters have been mailed! We are so excited to continue with this project all year long. We might even be able to schedule an after school field trip to meet our pen pals!

Math: We began double-digit addition with regrouping this week. Please help your child practice this concept at home. I want the children to show all of their work at this point. Too many mistakes are made if the steps are not shown. The children know to rewrite the sum of the ones place up above the numbers, then move down the digit into the ones place answer column and carry the one to the tens place.

Social Studies: We began our unit on the Creek People, who weret the first to inhabit the land we now call Georgia. We are working on notetaking and picking out important ideas as we read through our text book.

Reading: We are making our way through our chapter book, Charlotte's Web. The children have loved listening to this classic. We also worked on a historical fiction book called The Ox-Cart Man and wrote a summary of this story. We continued our work on fluency, playing special attention to punctuation. We worked in small groups, choosing our favorite page of a book and reading it multiple times to see if our fluency improved with each time. As your child becomes a more avid reader, don't forget the importance of being able to read a passage aloud! I'm trying to really emphasize the importance of speaking well as we go through the year.