Safari Room Happenings

Safari Room Sentinel - February 25, 2013

Language Arts: We are continuing to study flippy dolphin and how sounds can change and how important it is to cross-check: seeing if a word sounds right, looks right with the sounds and makes sense. This is incredibly important as your child enjoys longer texts and can easily lose meaning if they aren't monitoring for understanding. A great way to support this practice is by having them tell the "who" and the "what" at the end of a page and/or chapter and retelling with you on their Shape Go! Map.

We will also be starting to learn about how readers Infer when reading. Inferencing is to make an educated guess based on a reader's schema and clues from the text. We will be learning that sometimes the author doesn't give you the "whole story" and we have to use our knowledge and what we learned in the story to come up with a way to "fill in the blanks." Please look for a more detailed explanation about Inferencing in your email and how you can support this strategy with our young readers at home.

Writing: We finished our research projects by self-publishing our books last Friday. Many of our first graders need to work on their neatness and handwriting. I am not concerned about perfection, but I am going to start watching for correct formation, spacing between words, neatness/care for product and process in handwriting as we are approaching the last term of the year and need to solidify letter formation and writing for fluency in writing longer passages for second grade.

We will be ending our informational unit this week by writing biographies about a friend while immersing ourselves in some mentor texts about personal narrative. Personal Narrative are true stories a writer writes about themselves. These stories are "zoomed-in" to focus on one small moment, or even in time that is given a lot of descriptive detail.

Math: We are learning strategies for subtracting, by making a ten as we subtract or by counting up from the partner that we know. There will be 1 ShowMe Homework lesson that will be due by Wednesday. You will receive an email when the ShowMe is uploaded. This is an important unit for your child to slow down, take their time in counting and recognizing partners of 10. If you notice they do not know their partners of 10 fast, fluent and firmly, making flashcards to practice at home, logging on to www.xtramath.org or using a manipulative(such as 10 m and ms, pretzels, carrots, etc. and breaking them into the two partners of ten and having your child practice counting and saying them for automaticity) to group partners of ten are all strategies that will build your child's number sense.


Social Studies: Although we finished our unit on important holidays, president's and economics, we will continue to study these areas as they come up on our calendar.


Science:
We will be taking a pre-assessment on the next unit which is Earth Science - Studying the Weather, before I begin to plan specific lessons based on your students background knowledge of this content area.


Field Trip:
March 8 is our final Field Trip to DeGraaf Nature Center for Seasonal Surprises which ties directly into our Science curriculum. We have 4 parents joining our field trip, which will be fabulous! Parents, you are free to meet us at school and ride the bus with us at 9:00 or meet us at DeGraaf Nature Center in Holland at 9:30. Please let me know by March 1 what your preference is so I can plan accordingly with transportation.

March 4: No School for students. This is a day for parent-teacher conferences on an 'As-Needed' basis. Hopefully, you received a time slot from me on Friday in your child's folder if you or I requested a conference about your child. If you are still interested in having a conference for your child, please let me know and we can set up a time that works for you. Thanks!

Report cards will be coming home at the official end of the second term, so parents that have a conference with me will not be able to take their child's report card home, yet. Thanks for your understanding of this matter!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns or ideas, please feel at ease to contact me!
Cheers to some sunshine and a FULL week of learning this week.