We are rocking 2020!!
This week, we have worked on reading comprehension passages and using the text to answer questions. Often, students think they can remember enough details from the story that they don’t have to check their answers, but we are working on always proving our answers with the text. This is an easy skill to practice at home by asking your child questions and having your child show you where the answer came from in his or her book. This week, the students also practiced reading r-controlled vowels, like in the words far, enter, third, corn, and sure. Next week, the students will practice a phonics pattern known as diphthongs, where two vowels combine to make one syllable, as in the words coin, boy, and shout.
This week the students studied words that end in “k” or “ck.” The students learned that when the vowel is by itself and they hear the true short vowel sound then the word will end in “ck”, like in crack, kick, and wreck. When the vowel has a “friend” like the letters “n” or “r”, then you only need to add a “k”, like in the words link and park. Our next spelling unit will cover singular and plural nouns.
This week’s words are bright, chew, flour, forest, hour, inn, island, nibble, pale, and warn. The students are also studying synonyms, antonyms, and compound words.
The students have learned to identify the “naming part” and the “action part” of the sentence. In the future, they will add the terms subject and predicate to these ideas.
Our list of words to capitalize has grown! The students have learned to capitalize all names, months, holidays, cities, states, and countries. The students have also learned to put a comma between a city and a state.
This week, the students wrote stories about their adventures over winter break and throughout the past two weeks. Our big focus is adding details! It’s not just the beach, it’s the sandy beach that sparkled in the sunlight! It’s not a present, it’s a present wrapped in Bubbe’s beautiful wrapping paper with a bright, silver bow on top!
Unit five of Everyday Math covers Geometry! This unit covers 2D shapes like quadrilaterals or quadrangles (four-sided shapes with four angles), rhombi (plural for the diamond-like shape rhombus), parallelograms, and trapezoids. They have also studied 3D shapes like cylinders, pyramids, spheres, cones, and rectangular prisms. The students completed a symmetry project where they found examples of symmetrical shapes. Next week, we will continue to work on our geometry unit and practice addition and subtraction strategies.
Mrs. Gamlin has led the class through several digital citizenship lessons that will help them stay safe when they work and play online. Some of the things they have learned are:
While online, talk only to people you know.
Always ask a grownup before you go online.
Get a grownup’s help if you are uncomfortable online.
Set a timer to keep track of how long you are online.
They have also discussed when it’s okay to be on a device and when you should put the phone or tablet down! 😊