November, 2009

We have continued reading daily and building our reading stamina and comprehension skills. This month we will be working on story elements such as the main characters, the setting, the plot, inferencing, summarizing what we have read, and writing reading responses in our Reading retentive Journals. Our reading and writing programs are so beautifully correlated that what we teach daily usually reinforces what we are learning in each area. We will also be working on writing a realistic short story this month in Writer's Workshop. As far as grammar is concerned, we will be learning about exclamatory sentences, dictionary skills, pronouns, and using quotation marks in our short story. In math, we will be finishing our study on money and how to make change to $1.00. Counting money is such a developmental skill that many children still have quite a bit of trouble with this very important skill at this age. However, we continue to practice and our skills are growing. We have introduced making change and will revisit this skill throughout the school year. Besides working on our money skills, we will be learning about geometry. We will be looking at both plane and space shapes. Some of the components that we will be learning about will be the various plane shapes, vertices, right, acute and obtuse angles, as well as, learning about space shapes and their components like faces, edges, etc. We will continue our weekly Word Sorts and practicing fluency through the poems include in Words Their Way. In Social Studies we will learn about three Georgians important to our state's history. They are Tomochichi, James Oglethorpe and Mary Musgrove. As you can see we will be very busy, however, we will still make time for having fun with our book buddies, going to the Media Center and visiting the Scholastic Book Fair.

Please continue to have your child read daily and practice their basic math facts. One of our school goals this year is to increase the students math skills in basic math facts and we can all work with the children to help them to become more proficient in this area.

One last thing, please talk with your child about lunchroom behavior. The lunchroom monitors have reported to me that many of the children are playing and be silly at the table as well as talking when the lights are out due to the noise. Good manners and respect for others are lifelong skills that we can work on together.

WOM: Citizenship – Respectful devotion or allegiance to one’s country and/or school.