Jan. 28th Update...

Hello Parents and Students,

Well, it was a short week this week, but a very productive one! First, I'd like to thank all of you for coming to the classroom to discuss your child's progress over the past 5 months. It was great to be able to share all of our accomplishments with you. Please know that I am available any time to sit down and discuss your child's needs.
There is another extra credit opportunity available below for those of you who feel like challenging yourselves! This extra credit project involves a parent! Read below to find out the details. These presentations will involve parent participation in the classroom presentation! I will be scheduling times for these voluntary projects to be presented any morning the week of FEB. 16-19 from 8:00-8:45. If you and your child wish to participate in this project, please email me a date that works for you!
We will resume our Thursday book club on February 11. Please indicate in your child's agenda if he/she will be participating.
Check out below to find out what we've been doing in class this week...

Phonics/Grammar: This week, we reviewed tricky homophones! We learned the spelling and meaning of the words there, their, and they're as well as too, to, and two. Continue to emphasize correct spelling at home. We also reviewed the two sounds of the letters "oo". We played a matching game to help us recognize this sound in various words. We also worked in small groups on identifying parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective).

Language Arts: We read a variety of nonfiction books this week. We listened to the book Spiders and took notes on important details that we heard. We then took our notes and independently wrote an informational paragraph on this topic. Our focus on this paper was writing a paragraph of appropriate length and learning strategies to help us revise and edit our own papers. In Reading, we worked in small groups on finding important details in text pieces and proving our answers by highlighting important information, then transferring the information in our own words to answer the questions.

Math: We continued our study of various ways to represent numbers up to 9,999. Your child should be confident in showing standard form, written form, expanded form, base ten form, and place value of numbers in to the thousands. He/She should also easily be able tell whether a number is odd or even, greater than or less than another number, and be able to arrange the digits to show the greatest number possible and the least number possible. We practiced our three digit addition with regrouping skills. In small group time, we worked on using rounding to estimate answers to addition problems. We also worked on solving elapsed time problems. We really sharpened our number sense skills with our skip counting activities! We learned to identify the "counting rule" in a patterns and then continue the pattern on our own. We also had some fun learning a new COUNTING CADENCE song as we marched around the room, skip counting by 3's, 4's, 6's and 7's. Very tough! This is preparing us for multiplication, which we will begin next quarter. Remember to continue to practice those subtraction skills! If your child is having a tough time passing the timed tests, it may be time to break out those flash cards.

Classroom Reminders and News...

Thank you goes to Mrs. Brooks and Mrs. Thompson for their reading help on Wednesdays and Thursdays! These ladies are working really hard to help your child earn some extra AR points!

I promise we will eventually get through with our read aloud book, THE BFG. The children have been promised another movie night at my house when we complete the book, but it's taken us a bit longer to get through it with our snow day, MLK day, and early release week. Be on the lookout for movie night info coming soon!

Mark your calendars...The students will not have school on Monday, February 15th in observance of President's Day. I will be at school getting trained on our new SmartBoards that will be installed in the classroom sometime between now and March. This new technology is a result of SPLOST II funds. We are so excited to begin integrating this innovative technology into our curriculum.

Extra Credit Project: DUE the week of February 16-19...
1. Find an adult (mom, dad, grandma, aunt) to work on this project with.
2. Choose an item to research such as the automobile, motorcycle, space rocket, special tool, special kind of candy or food, technological gadget, etc. and begin your research.
3. Use the internet or books to find out why this invention came about (the necessity of it), the inventor, the date of the invention, how the invention was first made, who the invention was intended to help, and any other specific details that are important.
4. Take notes on your research. Remember to find at least 7 or 8 fully developed facts to help us learn about your invention (Parents should be active participants in this stage!)
5. Have your adult help you write, then type the information up on the computer. Remember to follow the conventions we have learned in class for a 2nd grade appropriate paragraph...
a. title centered, capitalized and underlined
b. name centered below title
c. skip a line and indent paragraph
d. begin with a broad topic sentence that grabs our attention (keep the entire paper in third person...no using the words "I', "me", "my" or "you" or any form thereof!)
e. fully develop the paragraph with AT LEAST 7 or 8 facts from your research
f. end with a broad closing sentence.
6. affix your paper to a poster board
7. include a graphic of somekind (this can be printed from the internet, a 3-d visual, or a self drawn illustration (Adults should be helping!)
8. Practice your presentation for the class. Your parents are invited to come in and be an ACTIVE participant in presenting this information to the class!