Ms. McSorley's News
January 19 - 22
Important Dates and Friendly Reminders
Monday, January 25: No school; teacher workshop
Tuesday, January 26: Family fitness night 6:30PM
Saturday, January 30: PTO/TES family dance 6-8PM
A Classroom Update
On Friday, we received our two bean bags just after lunch and right before we went to specials. We were able to use them for our math rotations that day. I was surprised at how the students handled them. There was no arguing about who got to sit in them! They took turns using them and wrote their name on the board to make sure everyone will get a chance to use them.
We are still waiting on our class set of clipboards as well as a bungee chair.
I told the students to be ready for some big changes when they came into our room this week. Two tables were removed and our remaining furniture has been rearranged. I am so excited to see their reactions when they come in tomorrow morning!
Literacy
We will learn fix-it strategies to help us when we have difficulty with the text. Some strategies we will learn include rereading the sentence, reading on, sounding out the letters/chunking the word into smaller parts, and looking at the picture.
Our spelling words are from the -ale and -ake families. They are as follows:
- fake
- rake
- sale
- shake
- tale
- old
- what
- baby
- bay
- +1 personal word to be decided as a class tomorrow morning
In writing, we will learn how to revise our stories. As writers, we will think about how to improve our stories. We can add or remove details, make our ideas clearer, rearrange our sentences, or make better word choices. At this stage in our writing process, we are working on making our ideas and details better, not correcting spelling or punctuation.
We are also working on a class book called Someday in which we share our dreams for the future.
*We will be taking some time on Tuesday to discuss Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the impact he has had on our country. We will be reading different texts and following up with a Reader's Response to show our understanding.
Math
Our specific areas of focus this week will include even and odd numbers, ordinal numbers from first through twentieth, and using tables to help find patterns. When discussing even and odd numbers, we learn that even numbers have partners and odd numbers have one "friend" without a partner. Ordinal numbers have been discussed throughout the year as we mark the days of school during our calendar math time. During this lesson, we look more specifically at an object's position.
You may have noticed that I started sending home an extra practice page last week. This is completely optional. It will always correlate with the lesson that we completed that day. Several students returned their extra practice the next day. This is not only a great way for me to confirm if a student understood the lesson, but it also provides me an opportunity to re-explain concepts as we look over the page together. If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to ask!
Science
This week students will screen their river rocks to discover five types of rocks. We will also discover silt after adding water to a vial of sand. Through this, we will learn the difference between sand and silt.