This week, we’re kicking off our exciting end-of-year research project all about rainforest animals! Each student will be working in a small research group to explore one of the following animals: anaconda, capybara, sloth, or otter.
Students will work together to gather facts, create presentations, and learn how to share their knowledge with others. Their hard work will be on display during our student-led conferences, which will take place at the school carnival on May 29th.
We can’t wait for you to see what your child discovers about these amazing rainforest creatures!
This week we will be starting Unit 9 of our literacy curriculum. This unit is called “Rules We Follow”. We will be reading stories, both fiction and non-fiction, about why we have rules and why it is important to follow them. We will continue our work with identifying key story elements, as well as talking about why it is important to follow the rules.
In phonics, we will continue our work with our long vowels by learning the long /u/ sound. We will be listening for it at the beginning of words, as well in the middle of words. We will also be working on substituting sounds in words, in the beginning, middle, and end of the words.
Please continue practicing the April sight words at home! You can find some fun practice ideas here.This week marks the conclusion of Unit 8, where we’ve been exploring animal habitats. Our focus questions are: How do habitats help animals meet their needs? and Why do people protect animal habitats? We’ll investigate these questions by reading stories such as Turtle Beach and Day and Night in the Desert. Students will also work on identifying key story elements, including plot, main idea, key details, and summarizing.
In phonics, we'll review the long /o/ sound—listening for it at the beginning and middle of words, blending it into new words, and matching words that share the same sound.
Please continue practicing the April sight words at home! You can find some fun practice ideas here.
Literacy Week of March 10th
We will be finishing Unit 7 in our Literacy Curriculum. Students will continue to explore what plants (living things) need to survive and grow, and how plants are able to get what they need from their environment.
For phonemic awareness, students will practice blending CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words. We will introduce the letters “Yy” and “Vv,” as well as review the letters “Ww” “Kk” “Qq” and “Ee.”
Students should have received their sight words for the month of March, so please continue to practice those at home. If you’re looking for some fun activities to try, try some of the one’s found here!
We will be introducing unit 7! Time is going by so quickly! In unit 7, students explore what living things, mostly plants, need to survive and grow. In addition to this, they will learn how these living things get what they need to survive from their environment.
For phonemic awareness, students will continue to work on blending CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words and will work with the letters ‘Kk’ and ‘Ww’. We will dive deeper into what are digraphs (a combination of 2 letters that make 1 sound - example: ‘sh’).
This week in literacy, we will be on our 3rd and final week of talking about What is a Culture? We will be introducing the /z/ sound. We will also be looking at the z sound as it occurs at the end of the word, where it is spelled as an S (ex. Chins, his, is). For our phonemic awareness, we will be working on matching words by their beginning sounds, and matching words by their ending sounds. We will also be working to identify the beginning and ending sounds of different words. We will be reading more about different cultures around the world, by reading My Dadima Wears a Sari and A Collection of Cultures.
Please continue working on the February sight words at home.
This week, we will continue our unit theme of culture and traditions. We will explore this theme through our investigation questions of: How do we prepare for a celebration? What makes a culture unique? We will introduce the letters Uu and Xx this week. During phonemic awareness we will practice final sound deletion (ex: say the word rat, and now take away the /t/, what’s the new word: ra). During writing we will write explanatory text using first and then for our guide. We will write how to wash our hands, how to brush our teeth, and more. Please practice the February sight words at home.
This week we will be continuing Unit 4 of the Literacy Curriculum. We will learn the sound that letter O makes, as well as what sound the letter R makes. We will be building on our work of phoneme segmentation last week, and continuing our work by stretching out the words, and trying to write them as well. On top of this, we will be continuing to take a look at the question “What makes a home?” and reading more stories about what different types of homes can look like.