Newsletter for September 20, 2013

Important Dates & Reminders

*I will try to highlight new dates and information with red text.

October 8, 2013 - Ohio Reading Achievement Assessment (Please avoid scheduling appointments and absences on this date). This test is administered in the fall to determine student needs and to serve as a baseline. It will be taken again in the spring to measure annual student growth. It is one of many assessments used to determine student reading instruction and needs.

October 11 - Fall Family Night is from 6 till 8. Three separate fliers were sent home on Friday. Please see them for more details. This is a great evening for families to reconnect and enjoy the beautiful fall weather. 

October 18, 2013 - Local author, Mark Walter, will be visiting Windermere to share the craft of writing.  He is well known for his Buckeyes A to Z book. He will be signing books if your student would like to purchase one. Order forms were sent home on Friday. You can visit his website here: http://markwalterbooks.com/about-author.html.

October 25, 2013 - Field Trip to Highbanks Metro Park for Earth Science. Please email if you are able to chaperon. I would like to have at least three more chaperons.

October 25, 2013 - End of the first quarter

October 28, 2013 - No school, teacher grading day

October 31, 2013 - Halloween party (extended lunch from 12pm till 1:30pm, most students go home to change into costumes). Please note it is district policy that no costume may include any weapons or facsimiles.

What We Learned This Week

Word Study
We memorized our high frequency word, "probably," using several kinesthetic, auditory, and visual methods to increase the likelihood of retention and retrieval. 

Emma demonstrates our approach. We do each of the steps modeled three times.

Spelling patterns were long and short e sounds. Long e sounds were represented by vowel teams /ee/ (e.g., sheep) and /ea/ (e.g., speak) and the Vowel-Consonant-E (VCE, e.g., these) syllable type. Short e sounds were represented as closed syllables (e followed by a consonant, e.g., bed).

Reading
We focused on creating a summary statement with a subject and predicate. We utilize the 5 W's (who, what, where, when, and why). I prefer teaching students "subject" and "predicate" because "who" suggests a person and "what" can also be confused for the subject. We add when, where, and why when they benefit understanding.

Students are meeting with me in individual conferences where we work on a specific skill or strategy to enhance their reading in one of four areas: comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and vocabulary. I am also working on non-fiction comprehension with a few students. I know I've stated it before, I can't over-emphasize the importance of sustained reading of just right books.

Students are working on fluency by using poetry because it demands attention to pace, meter, and emphasis of punctuation and rhyme, all essential elements of fluency.

Lauren shares I'm Being Eaten by a Boa Constrictor by Shel Silverstein

Writing
We started the writing process in earnest with our first personal narratives. The writing process is: planning, drafting, rereading, revising, editing and publishing. We will work on planning, drafting, and rereading for the remainder of the grading period simply to get students into the habit of rereading their own work for complete sentences. We use a kinesthetic device to remember the writing process:

James demonstrates the writing process

Students use writing folders that have commonly misspelled words and a thesaurus to improve our descriptive language.

Math

We continued with numeracy, introduced decimals (tenths and hundredths), and time to the quarter past, half-past, and quarter-till. I use money to support students understanding of tenths and hundredths (ten dimes in a whole dollar, hence "tenths" and one hundred pennies in one dollar, hence "hundredths"). We emphasize the "whole" or the "one" and decimals and fractions represent two different ways of showing less than one. I find having students represent our decimals as fractions helps them in naming them and it is a good introduction to understanding fractions (e.g., 0.3 = 3/10 and it is equivalent to 0.30 = 30/100). This takes a while to grasp but is a great foundation for several future math concepts.

Science
We reviewed the following big ideas for earth science: rocks are made of minerals, minerals can be classified by characteristics (we compared hardness, color, and translucence). We also drew comparisons to our tree study where we classified trees by leaf shape, leaf arrangement, bark, branch arrangement, and seeds/fruits.