Welcome 2019

Dear Families,

Welcome to 2019! We hope the start of the year is going well for you all. It was great to see the kids after our time away, and to hear the stories from your winter adventures.

As we settle back into school, we are taking time to review and practice our class rules and routines. We set goals for the new year, and are working on doing our personal best all throughout the day. In most areas of the curriculum, we are continuing units we began in December.

In Writing, we are almost done with our nonfiction books! The students have been working very hard to teach readers about their topics, and are spending this week revising, editing, drawing diagrams, and adding text features such as a glossary and index. We will be finished by Friday.

In Reading Workshop, we are continuing our nonfiction study with a focus on interpreting the special language, or “lingo” found in our nonfiction books. We are noticing key words, as well as all the ways an author works to teach us new vocabulary through context clues, text boxes, and the glossary. This deep study of language in nonfiction carries over into our fiction reading as well. Children are learning to slow down and put in the hard work of understanding new words, and are seeing that writers do a lot to help us make meaning.

In Math Workshop, we are jumping into the data portion of our Measurement and Data unit. We learned about line plots and bar graphs as a way to organize data, and are practicing how to draw conclusions from the data. At home, look out for charts and graphs that you come across, and share them with your child. Reading charts and graphs for information is an important skill.

Some families have asked us to share online and other math resources. The link below is a compilation of great websites and games that you can use to explore math with your students. While some require a paid subscription, many are free to use. Enjoy! Math Websites and Resources

This week, we will be starting to do Science in class as a supplement to the work Mr. Dennis does in the Science lab! We are beginning with a unit on landforms, and will be investigating how landforms change over time.  

This week we also had a Bullying Prevention Lesson in which we learned how to recognize bullying. The class watched videos showing what bullying could look like in school. We brainstormed ways to ‘recognize’ what bullying looks like and began to talk about ways to solve some of these problems. Our first step in bullying prevention is learning to recognize what bullying is. Please see the chart below with our ideas:

Reminders:

• Scholastic orders will be submitted at the end of each month.
• January 21st- NO School (Martin Luther King Jr. Day)
• Maker Space Trip to Staten Island: January 29th/30th
• February 5th: NO School (Lunar New Year)

Have a wonderful week!

Ms. Mathis and Ms. Anne