March is just around the corner...

Hello All!
I hope everyone had a wonderful February vacation. We had a lot of germs around before vacation and I was glad to see we had everyone back in school.
Once we got the furniture back into place Monday morning, it was right back into the swing of things. We are learning all about -le words this week. Whistle, jungle, wrestle.....what other -le words can you come up with? We are also talking about possessive nouns and pronouns. We talked about when to add 's and that it shows ownership.
Our story in our anthology book this week is a non-fiction story called Can Elephants Paint? We know that non-fiction stories give us true information and that the pictures in the story are real photographs, not pictures drawn by an artist.
In math, we are going back to addition and subtraction strategies, but we are concentrating on sums to 12. We reviewed our doubles and doubles plus 1 facts. We will also learn strategies on how to add three numbers.
In science, we will begin our unit on weather. We discuss the weather every day as part of our morning meeting but we will introduce the children to some other words that have to do with weather. We will also do a March themed weather project.
A sneak peak to next week:
In ELA - ow and oa. We will read Snow Surprise. Comprehension - Author's purpose/point of view. Grammar - homophones
In Math - relating addition and subtraction. Fact families.
In Science - Measuring Temperature.

Next week there are two half days, March 7th and 8th. Dismissal will be at 12:30. If we haven't spoken recently and you have any current concerns about your child, please email me to set up a conference time.

Have a wonderful week!
Mrs. M
Mrs. Cataldo
Mrs. Fiore

Happy Valentine's Day!

February is already half over......Valentine's Day is Tuesday and only one week until February
Vacation. Spring is right around the corner.
Last week we learned all about the digraphs qu and wh and the endings -ed and -ing. We learned when we have to double the final consonant before adding these endings. In our
anthology, we talked about biographies. What type of information do we find in
a biography? We read a biography about Tomas Rivera. We learned many details
about his life. As a connection to what we learned in this story, the students
wrote about what they want to be when they get older during writer's workshop.
During reading groups, after working on our phonics focus, our comprehension
focus was details, sequencing and asking questions. Our grammar focus was using
I and me. Is it correct to say, "Julie and me are going out to play?"
In math, we were
talking about numbers - greater than and less than. We did a Smartboard lesson
that showed the greater than and less than sign as an alligator mouth and the
open part of the alligator mouth always faces the bigger number because the
alligator chomps on the bigger number.
In science, we made
balloon rockets. We set up a baggie on fishing wire strung between two chairs
and placed a blown up balloon inside the baggie. Depending on how big the
balloon was, the "rocket" sped across the wire to the other chair.
Our groups tried many different ways of making our rocket move. One big
balloon, two small balloons, two big balloons.....and some friends had races.
How long did it take your rocket to get across the wire?
A look at the week
ahead:
In ELA - Phonics
focus - r controlled vowels: ur, er and ir and inflections -er and -est.
Comprehension - Main idea and summarize. Grammar - using he, she, it and they.
In Math - skip
counting by 2's, 5's and 10's. Patterns on a 100's chart. 10 more and 10 less.
We will not have
science this week.
Have a wonderful
week!
Mrs. M
Mrs. Cataldo
Mrs. Fiore