Week of January 9, 2012

Dear Parents:

Don't forget that we are presenting our riddles at Town Meeting tomorrow (Tuesday)! Please practice with your child tonight on telling their riddle(s) with a BIG, clear, and EXPRESSIVE voice! Remind your child to pause after the riddle so we can give someone a chance to try to solve it. If they know the riddle by memory, great! They will have a copy with them at town meeting, just in case.

This week in 1-4:

Language Arts: We are working on words with the long o sound spelled oa as in "boat" and ow as in "snow". We will also be working more on those sometimes troublesome words - homophones.

Reading Workshop: This week we are reestablishing our routines of reading workshop and, over the next few weeks, I will begin assessing the students to find their new level of just right books. We are beginning a new unit in reading workshop that focuses on bringing word power to our reading. We'll learn that smart readers... use a variety of print strategies flexibly to decode; make sure they understand what they read by monitoring for meaning, questioning, visualizing, inferring, and self-correcting; and read with fluency by inferring, determining importance, and rereading their books. This week we will focus on flexibly using print strategies for decoding. This means that we will be able to use many strategies, moving from one to another with ease to find the perfect strategy for decoding a particular word. Often children tend to rely on one or two strategies they've learned and sometimes those strategies don't help decode the tricky word they are stuck on. We'll learn that readers figure out tricky words by paying attention to the endings of words and by thinking about what makes sense. When reading with your child at home, please remind them to use all the strategies from their "toolbox" that they have learned through phonics, word study, and reading workshop to help them become more accurate, fluent, and expressive readers.

Writer's Workshop: We'll continue working with our peer editors and become "word wall detectives" in making sure that we are spelling our word wall words correctly. We will soon be choosing another piece for publishing!

Math: Today we were introduced to the relation symbols <, >, and =. This week, the children will also be making up and solving number stories involving relations, addition, and subtraction. We'll also be working on addition of 2-digit numbers. Please continue to practice the basic addition and subtraction facts with your child for automaticity.

Science/SS: We continue our study of the solar system. Last week, Mrs. Schiaparelli, a Shorecrest parent and substitute, brought in his high-powered telescope to allow the children to actually look at the sun and see the sunspots! Did you know that one single sunspot is as big or bigger than our planet Earth? Click on the link for our class shutterfly site to see pictures!

http://mrsowensclass20112012.shutterfly.com/

Volunteers this week:

• Tuesday - Art - Kimberly Burke (12:00)
• Wednesday - Math Game - Mai Nguyen (1:15) Note time change!
  
• Thursday - Library Check-out - Kimberly Burke (12:00)
• Friday - Parent Reader - Susannah Malison (2:15)

Other Reminders:

Please send in a photograph of your child's grandparents or special friend by Friday! I have only received a couple so far! Please send it in whether or not they will be here on that special day. Grandparents/Special Friends Day is Friday, January 27th. Dismissal will be at noon!

Please send in the Conference Day form no later than Thursday! If you need a different time than is offered, please note that on the form. Conference Day is Thursday, February 9th. There will be no school for students!

There will also be no school on Martin Luther King Day, January 16th.

Please be sure to practice reading, spelling, and writing the vocabulary words on the word rings every day. Return the word card rings EVERY Thursday.

Please label all sweaters, sweatshirts, and jackets with your child's name and check that the ones you have belong to your child. They can easily get mixed up at school!

Thank you and have a great week!
Susan