Quarter Letter

SECOND QUARTER

READING
In reading, the children will continue to be exposed to entertaining stories.  It will be from these stories 
that they will continue to work on story elements, such as characters, setting, plots, and summarizing 
what they have read.  Through various activities, the children will be using context clues to get the 
main idea, find supporting details, draw conclusions, and discover the meaning of new vocabulary.  By 
compare and contrast, the children will have an understanding of antonyms and synonyms. 

ENGLISH
English will take us on the road to nouns, possessive nouns, abbreviations for titles, days and months.  
We will also travel down another path with verbs.  That study will include action verbs, linking verbs, 
and helping verbs.  This quarter the children will do some explanatory writing.  They will be writing in 
sequence, putting together a "how-to" list of doing a task or making something.

SPELLING
Spelling will take us in the direction of words with sounds that contain vowel + r ( dark, clear, storm, 
her, girl, turn, work), the sound  'oi ' ( coin, boy ), the 'j' sound ( stage, jump, judge, giraffe), and the 'k' 
and 'kw' sounds (quick, park, crack).  To assist your child with spelling, it would be beneficial if your 
child would review five words each night. 
  
MATH
After completing Money and Time, we will follow the path of Addition and Subtraction.  We begin by 
adding two, three, and four digit numbers.  The path gets steep when we begin regrouping and column 
addition.  We continue to climb as we study subtraction with regrouping and borrowing.  Finally, we 
reach the summit as we begin to study multiplication concepts.  Timed tests will continue.  Daily 
practice of math facts will be encouraged.

SCIENCE
Upon completing Life Science, we dive into the earth's surface and crust.  Earthquakes, volcanoes, rocks 
and soil, weather patterns and the water cycle are many topics we explore.  Finally, we study about the 
earth's natural resources.  A question we strive to answer is: As Catholics, how can we be good 
stewards of our God-given natural resources?