Week 18

What could be better than learning about all of the people in our community? After all, they help make Burlington a great place to live. Community helpers is our new theme. We will be focused on what each helper does as his/her job, the tools they need and character traits of people in these valuable professions. Speaking of great communities, thanks to all of the parents who sent donation or crafts for the fundraiser raffle basket! We are building quite a collection.

Mentor Texts:

Students were introduced to the writing concept instruct. 

They practiced the procedure for a school fire drill, made a movie and created posters explaining how to be safe in a fire drill. This was presented to the whole class as way to teach the features of a good instructional text.

Features:

Title

sequences steps

Action word to tell the reader what to do

Pictures and captions to describe steps

Next week students will be creating short video clip and independently producing a poster of their own! The choices will be: How to Brush Your Teeth, How to Check Out a Library Book, How to Call 9-1-1, or How to Wash Your Hands.

What we have been up to:

Readers Response and Comprehension:

• Identifying character traits, main idea and details, (see mentor text)
• Making text to self connections
• New Guided reading groups. Please be sure your child returns his/her leveled book the very next day!!! We are seeing lots of reading progress kids are building confidence and flying through books.

Writing:

• Introduce the student to Instructional writing as a genre. Whole class project titled, How to be safe in a fire drill.
• Review the features of a good narrative.
• Wrote a February break story. Thanks for helping to make such great material. The kids shared stories of: tubing, skiing, visiting friends, trampoline parks, playdates, cooking and so much more!

Phonics/Phonological Awareness:

• Listening for beginning blends, decoding cvc and ccvc words, (cat and clap).
• Handwriting uppercase letters M, N, O, P
• Sentence writing with spaces and appropriate punctuation ( . & ?)

Math:

• Relating addition and subtraction.
• Recognizing the symbols for addition and subtraction (+, -, =)
• Vocabulary words: sum, difference, whole & part
• Exploring ways to make numbers ( see charts)

     6

0	6
1	5
2	4
3	3
4	2
5	1
6	0

Social Studies: 

• Community helpers with a focus of firefighters.
• Chineese New Year.
• Presidents Day and the job of the president.

Guiding Questions:

Who is the president of the United States of America?
Why to we celebrate President's Day?
What holidays are most important to our family?
Why are firefighters brave?
How can you describe a doctor, (librarian, teacher, police officer etc.)? Ask for adjectives.
What do you want to be when you grow up? Why?
Tell me the sum of  ___ and _____.
The me the difference between ______ and ______.