Sharing Opinions

The last couple of weeks during Writing Workshop, the children worked on opinion and persuasive writing.  Students learned to state their opinion about a topic and support their opinion with reasons. Children also learned to write persuasive letters.  This was a short but exciting writing unit for the children.  Be on the lookout for samples of this writing to come home in the next few days.  I'm sure your children will be very excited to share their persuasive letters with you!  We have now moved on to our small moment writing unit.

During Reading Workshop, we started a character unit.  Children learned that:

• characters are the people or animals in a story.
• readers can get to know a character by doing a picture walk before they start reading.
• readers can pay attention to a character's facial expressions and body language to understand how a character might be feeling.
• readers can change their voices to sound like a character.
• readers should notice how a character's feelings might change throughout a story. 

We have also been learning about different types of punctuation.  We have learned about periods, commas, question marks, exclamation points, and quotation marks.  Children are working on reading sentences like the punctuation tells us to read.

During Math we:

• showed different combinations for a number.
• played a game called Bump to help us practice adding numbers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• reviewed names and attributes of 2-dimensional shapes and 3-dimensional objects.
• compared and contrasted 2-dimensional shapes to 3-dimensional objects.
• played Dice Subtraction.

On Wednesday and Friday of this week, I will be doing kindergarten screening with our incoming kindergartners.  Isn't it hard to believe that last year at this time your kindergartners were the ones coming in for screening?!  Time sure does fly!  Although I will be in the building, your children will have a substitute on Wednesday and Friday.  

Enjoy the rest of your week!

Katie