This Month's Focus

Reading

Really Great Reading with a Blast- Each week students practice their "heart words," which are like sight words that mostly follow an irregular spelling pattern and they should work to "know by heart." In May we will be practicing the heart words from units 23-25. Please see the "sight words" tab to identify which words those are and some ways that you can practice them at home.  

In phonics, we will study suffixes with "ed," "other vowels-ou and oo," and "inflectional endings-er, s, ed, and ing." We use "look, think, say" and pop up methods for our phonics work, as well as "finger stretching" where we place a finger up for every phoneme (sound) we hear in a word, "spell it out" where we color in a dot and write the letter(s) for every sound, and we use our tile kits to practice sounding out and spelling our phonics words in alphabet tiles. Students practice reading our decodable words in short phrases and in text. 

✏️WRITING

We will wrap up our "How To" informational writing and move on to our informational "All About" books. We will write all about chicks, as we are studying them in science, and hatching eggs in class too! We will describe the animal, use labels, and diagrams to mimic non-fiction books.  In addition to informational writing, we will add in some holiday, seasonal writing, and art.

📊 MATH

Geometry & Measurement- We are wrapping up our unit with 2D and 3D shapes. We will move into more measurement practice using standard and nonstandard units. DON'T FORGET TO STILL practice writing numbers with correct (NO BACKWARDS #s) formation in sections of 20 at home. (1-20, 21-40, 41-60, etc.) This is a must before heading into Second Grade!

Number Corner-In May, our calendar patterns follow Tad the frog as he hops along our 120 grid to form a mystery picture! We are using many of our collective strategies to hop forward, backward, and by the decades. Students are also counting by quarters, half dollars, and dollar coins. Practice counting coins at home as this will help students identify different coins, but also build confidence in a valuable skill!

⚛ STEM

We are continuing to learn about animal adaptations. Students are learning how creatures adapt to their environment to survive and protect themselves from predators. We are also incubating fertilized chicken eggs that will hatch within the next couple of weeks! It's been fun to learn about the chicken life cycle and we'll compare the young chicks to their adult parents. We'll wrap up the STEM learning this year with some biomimicry. The idea is that humans look at nature to copy ideas that will help make our lives easier... such as velcro!