Monday Message

I hope everyone had a wonderful spring break!  I enjoyed a couple nice sunny days.

News for the week...

    This week we will start unit 4 of Writer's Workshop.  In this unit students will begin to write opinion pieces.  We will be looking for ways to make our world a better place.  Students will be keeping an eye out for problems they see at school (or at home) and then they will write to try to persuade others to fix this problem.  We will be writing letters, poster, petitions, etc.  We are excited about this new way to express ourselves!
     In Math we will begin our introduction to subtraction book.  We will use pictures and manipulatives to help us solve simple subtraction problems.  Many students are very good at this already.
    Guided Reading groups continue to go very well.  Many students are using many of our word strategies independently.  Our newest strategy is Flippy the Dolphin.  Flippy reminds us that vowels make a short and a long sound and sometimes when decoding words we need to "flip" the vowel sound in order to hear the word.
    We are also beginning our study of word families.  This week we will focus on the "an" word family.  Students will now be help accountable for spelling words in this family correctly.


Thank you to the many people that helped out in one way or another with Grandparents Day.  It was  huge success and we couldn't have done it without you.  I hope all the grandparents enjoyed the day.

Reminder:
Friday is spring picture day.  All students pictures will be taken.  You are not required to purchase but they do take good pictures.  It is a full length shot and students are invited to bring a prop.  (soccer ball, teddy bear, trophy, etc)