Exploring Shapes!

We had a great half day on Friday. Students who took part in Jump Rope for Heart were very excited to share their experiences with the class. The other students did a great job organizing our book areas in the classroom as well as their book boxes. It was great meeting with some of you for conferences and I look forward to meeting with the rest of you this Friday.

The students had a busy week at school. We started a Geometry Unit in math. Students will be exploring shapes to learn about their attributes through a variety of hands-on-activities and new Math Workplace Stations. The students had a great time using mirrors and pattern blocks to see what reflections are made when looking at shapes in a two way mirror. I am excited to see what discoveries the students will continue to make throughout the unit. Also, we will be starting to do Mad Minutes daily in our classroom. These are exercises to build fact fluency with addition and subtraction. The students will be challenging themselves to move quickly and carefully when solving these equations.

We completed our study of Non-Fiction books in Readers' Workshop. The students were able to share their favorite aspect of reading Non-Fiction. They shared facts they learned, text features that they enjoyed, and certain topics they enjoyed learning more about. It was great to see the culmination of such an intensive unit of study. In Writers' Workshop the students finished up their writing on Small Moments. We spent last week revising our writing. Students were learning about the importance of looking back at writing and making sure they are ready to share. On Tuesday, the children will be sharing their favorite Small Moment Piece with in a small group.

In Fundations, the class is starting a unit on the suffix /s/. We have discussed the idea of a base word and then adding a suffix. The students discovered that adding the suffix /s/ changes the word to mean that there is now more than one. The students also are practicing that the suffix /s/ can make both a /s/ and a /z/ sound at the end of a word. We will continue this study for three weeks. I will be sending home the newsletter from Fundations in the Friday Folders this week.

Hope you all had a terrific weekend.