Sunday, March 6, 2011

Getting Ready to Travel

I would like to start out with a reminder that Samsula's Spring Break will begin for Students at the end of the school day Thursday. Friday is a Teacher Work Day. I hope everyone will enjoy their breaks and return rested and ready to learn!

In Social Studies we are going to learn about all of the different means of travel we have today. As well as the evolution travel has made over time. Today is a fast paced world and we travel quickly, too. This week students will compare and contrast early travel to the travel of today.

In Mathematics on Friday we began to look at the concepts of factions -- breaking a whole into equal parts. Over this next week we will spend time with both Kindergarten and 1st grade learning about halves (1/2 one out of 2), quarters (1/4 one out of four) and thirds (1/3 one out of three). This is going to be a fun concept with a lot of hands-on activities as well as paper and pencil to reinforce.

The time has arrived! Next week our Kindergarten students will begin studying the 1st grade unit 1 reading curriculum. Kindergarten will be reading Pam and Sam in class and will use this story to build upon their knowledge of characters and setting. We will still continue our short /i/ word family study. First grade is moving on up through the curriculum as well and has received their last reading anthology book that will take us through the last two units. This next week 1st graders will be reading Olivia in class. As we read this story and others we will learn about fantasy and reality. 1st grade's phonics and spelling is based on the long /o/ sound spelled o, oa, ow. Spelling words related to phonics are: boat, coat, go, low, now and row. High frequency words to know are: mother, father, try, always, love, firm and supposed.

In Language Arts we will continue our Writer's Workshop and have more mini-lessons on this month's writing theme -- poetry. Last week we were introduced to the idea of writing poetry and learned about many types of poems. We practiced writing acrostic poems. This week we will take a better look at "shape" or concrete poems. Below is a Kindergarten example of presenting writing during our bi-monthly Author's Day.





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