October Adventures

Hello Families,

We had a wonderful field trip to the Staten Island Museum on Monday! We learned a lot about Earth Materials, and left filled with new questions we are excited to explore. We wish to extend a huge thank you to our parent chaperones who helped make our first field trip smooth and fun. Check out the pictures below.

This week in math, we are focusing on specific computational strategies we use as mathematicians. We are beginning by thinking about our addition strategies, both within the context of a story problem, and with “bare number” problems that do not involve a story. Two of the main strategies kids are using are splitting both addends into tens and ones, or splitting one addend and keeping the other whole. Below are examples of student work showing each strategy:

Splitting Both Addends:

Splitting One Addend:

In Social Studies, we are continuing our geography work. This week we will begin to focus on the geography of New York City. After discovering where exactly we exist on the globe (continent, country, state, city, borough…), students will be working on labeling and adding features to their own New York City maps. We will be reading the book Me on the Map, by Joan Sweeney. We encourage you to explore Google Earth with your child at home. This tool can help build perspective and solidify an understanding of where we live on our planet.

In reading, we are continuing with our class read aloud Puppy Power. Together, we are beginning to get to know our main characters by noticing what they do and say. Their actions give us insight into their personalities and preferences. We recognize that it is so important to read slowly and carefully in order to fully understand our books. Students are also building their independent reading stamina by reading for longer periods of time.

We have begun drafting our new pieces in writing. We studied the beginnings of the books of our mentor author Kevin Henkes to get ideas for how to start our own stories. We tried out beginning our stories in different ways, and chose the beginning that we liked best. We will continue to notice the crafts Kevin Henkes uses, including repetition, dialogue, and action, and try them out in our own writing.

We will post a new assignment to ReadWorks by the end of the week. Please help your child sign in to complete the assignment by November 1.

The permission slip for our next trip will be coming home soon. Be on the lookout!

Our first birthday celebration for our September/October kids will be on October 31st from 1:45-2:15pm. Class parents will be reaching out to organize the festivities. If your child has a specific food allergy you can send a snack in to keep here in the classroom.