Week of 8/25/08

Hi all! Well, we have our first full week under our belt! The children are so enjoyable! Here is what's on the agenda this week:

Language Arts - We will be reading a story called Lewis and Clark, A Dog's Tale, working on related vocabulary, reviewing last week's vocabulary, testing reading comprehension, and working on the reading skill, cause and effect. Our spelling words are long a and i words. Overall, the children did well on their spelling test last Thursday! Yeah! We will look at imperative and exclamatory sentences too this week.

Math - Compare and Order numbers and Rounding Last week, I talked to the children about benchmarks when estimating. I sent 2 estimation jars home with Matt. He brought them back with a benchmark number of items in 1 jar and the other jar was full of the same item. The children hopefully can use the benchmark jar to give a better estimate of the full jar. Whoever gets closest to the amount in the full jar gets to take them home next! Get creative with whatever you put in them. Matt did a great job!

Social Studies - Map work including: continents, hemispheres, landforms and boundaries, and grids I will also read the story about Flat Stanley. It is a story about a little boy who becomes flat after a bulliten board falls on him. He has many adventures being flat, but the biggest is when he is mailed in an envelope to his friend in another state. We are going to make our own Flat Stanleys this week. Please be thinking of someone you know in another city, state, or country that you could mail Flat Stanley to. They in turn could take pictures of Flat Stanley in front of a place or places in their city, state, or country to help us learn a little more about other places. They could include a postcard and a letter explaining Flat Stanley's adventures when they send him back. This project has been done in the past with great success! It is quite exciting! Please help us out!

Science - Ocean Right now, we are working in groups and by teacher guidance on an ocean reading packet to get them more familiar with different types of ocean animals. We have reviewed the different oceans and will learn about other "oceany" facts. Each child will eventually choose an ocean animal to become an expert on. They will write a 3-5 paragraph report and include an illustration. We will go over how to pick out the important information when covering topics and how to turn notes into sentences and paragraphs.

I will post first day of school pictures soon! I am waiting on 1 permission slip.

I will be sending our first Scholastic book order home this week. More information about that will come later this week.

Don't forget reading homework is due on Monday.