9-Nov. 8-11, 2021

Reading: This week’s theme is about how animals live in communities and where animals live together. We learning to find text evidence, and identify main idea and details. We're focusing on non-fiction books. Additionally we'll apply these ideas to our good fit books and even read a lot of books about geology.

Reading Vocabulary(oral): habitat, depend, hibernate, tranquil, tolerate. Encourage your child to search for interesting vocabulary words. We’re reading different genres of text from fiction to non-fiction and beginning to compare texts.

Writing: Informative (rock report) and opinion. Students are working on their rock report about a special rock. We've taken field notes and are writing the descriptions in complete sentences. They also do writing in response to our Wonders Textbooks as well as have a chance to do their own Choice writing. We love to share our work. We continue to work on capitalization, spacing, word order and periods in their statement sentences. We’re adding ! and ? in our work. If they don't know how to spell a word, encourage them to underline it. Students are also learning about nouns(naming words), and inflections -ed endings. Phonics/Sight Words/Phonics/Spelling: Ending letter blends "-nd, -nk, -st" (-sk, -mp)

Social Studies: We are learning about the voting process and even a little about the history of the right to vote. Students are are running an election campaign to elect lead classroom helpers. Our candidates are The Count, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird. While these candidates and their Running Mate go on the campaign trail, the rest of the class are preparing for a Town Hall meeting where they can ask questions of our candidates. They brainstormed what makes a good leader and what we need for our class. They'll also write at least 3 questions that will help them determine the best candidate for the job. They will be voting for 1 team to be our lead classroom helpers when Mrs. Pilate is unable to help during group times. Later in the week and into next week, we’ll also learn about Veteran’s Day and the importance of our Military and why we should honor them.

In honor of our Veterans and Veteran’s Day, we learned about the branches of the military and what they do as well as why it is important to honor and recognize our Veteran’s for their service. We also made wonderful heartfelt thank you cards for Veterans. and shared about the veterans in our family. Social Studies Vocabulary (oral): citizen, veteran, honor, duty, military branches(Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard)

Social Studies Vocabulary (oral): vote, Election Day, citizen, rights, responsibilities, citizen, families, homes

Mathematics: Students are moving to practicing subtraction equations and showing proof of these as well as double checking to see if it makes sense. We’re continuing to solve story problems and even write our own. We have been focusing on subtraction and are also learning how to solve problems in either horizontal or vertical arrangement.

Science: We have been learning about geology and Earth materials. In addition to investigations about rocks and their properties and learning about the different rock groups in the rock cycle we’re learning to sort our rocks by sizes using our hands and screens-now by themselves. Students will be learning to identify boulders, large pebbles, small pebbles, large gravel, small gravel, sand and later clay and silt. They have seen how earth materials settle out in water by size and also investigated sand from many places around the world and raw clay from a river bank to discover the many other earth materials that are in it. We'll investigate red and white clay before moving into soil and its components. Students will be going outside on an adventure to collect soil samples from the river (gravel and sand rich), garden beds (hummus rich), and outside the garden (clay rich). We'll also be searching for examples of the many ways rocks are used all around us in our daily lives.

Science Vocabulary (oral): properties, igneous, tuff, scoria, basalt, sorting

Other: SNACKS. Please remember to pack the snack in the backpack pouch and not their lunch box. This helps with time efficiency and also not eating extra food. Snack should hopefully even fit in their mailbox.