Weekly Update

Dear Families,

It is hard to imagine, but the month of September is almost over! It went by so fast. The students have settled into our new classroom routine beautifully and are eager to learn every day. As we move into October, the weather will get colder. Please make sure your child comes to school dressed for the outdoors as we have recess every day (unless it is raining). If you wish to keep an extra fleece jacket or sweatshirt in your child’s locker, that is fine. Just make sure that you check the locker periodically as many items of clothing sometimes gets forgotten or misplaced when in school.

As part of our September theme, the students have learned about Johnny Appleseed. His birthday was on September 26th. The students will bring home Apple Seed Bags this week, bags they decorated and made themselves for collecting and storing apple seeds. We hope that you can all find a special spot where you can plant your child’s apple seed-just like Johnny Appleseed. The students also practiced their scientific skills this week as they predicted how many seeds were inside two apples, one red and one green apple. We had very valuable discussions after the apples were cut open and the seeds counted as we realized what “a reasonable prediction” is. (For those interested, the green apple had 11 seeds and the red apple had 4). Perhaps you can do a similar activity at home and share with us next week. For example, how many apples do you need to eat to get 10 seeds? How many seeds are inside a pear, an orange, a grape? Please share you scientific discoveries! Thank you!

The students continued working on their reading strategies this week in Reader’s Workshop and they feel more comfortable using these strategies independently every day. Your child might have brought home “Reading Strategies” bookmark to guide and support his/her reading. Please use this daily as your child reads. It provides a visual representation of the strategies we are working on now in the classroom. If your child did not bring this home already, one will be included in this week’s Thursday Folder. I will also post it on our Wiki, in our Link Library so you can print out your own. Since we focus on developing good reading strategies for independent reading, the students also used the computer program “Paint” to represent their favorite strategies. Please look for our first publication soon as our book will be published shortly!

In Writer’s Workshop, the students continued writing for many purposes, and this week the students started writing letters to different people at our school. The students learned that letters usually include the date and clearly states who it is for. We started our letters with “Dear” We also learned that it is important to wrap it up at the end by stating who the letter is from. Some students chose to write a letter to a former teacher, some wrote to Mr. Terko, while others decided to write to our paras and bus drivers! The students did an amazing job. We hope to get responses back soon!
In Writer’s Workshop, the students are not only learning to be confident spellers, but they are also learning to be confident authors. They are learning that writing is a process, a process that takes time and requires attention, revision and editing. Ask your child to explain COPS for you, as we use this acronym to check for capitalization, organization, punctuation and spelling.

Your child is bringing home his/her first packet of Daily Language Review this week. This packet represents work your child has completed in the area of grammar and sentence structure throughout the week. All the classrooms on our team participate in this program and the students completed one small daily activity. Please look it over and talk to you child about grammar and sentence structure. Thank you. Your child will not complete this every week, but you will see it come home approximately every other week.

Ask your child about:
• Podcasting 4 Winds (We’re on iTunes now. If you want to RSS through iTunes, Google Reader, etc please access www.mmccormack.podbean.com, or go directly to our Team Harmony web-site and click on Podcasting Harmony.)
• Listen to Understand
• Private Think Time
• Active Listening
• Our new classroom poster about respect and how we can earn stickers for it. Ask you child to explain what happens when we get 100!!
• The song “My Bonnie lies over the Ocean”


Have a great rest of the week.
Regards,

Maria McCormack