Happy September everyone! The start to our year has been wonderful and I can't wait to see what is in store for the rest of the year! Below you will find some important dates and curriculum updates! Please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns! Dojo is the easiest way to reach me, but I also check my emails daily.
Important Dates:
- September 4: NO SCHOOL (Labor Day)
- September 21: Math Menus Due
- September 22: NO SCHOOL (Teacher Work Day)
- September 29: Barky's Bonfire!
Curriculum Updates:
- Math: We are well into our first unit of math! So far the kids have learned how to read, create, and analyze scaled picture and bar graphs. All of this work will lead us into our work with multiplication! We will begin with an understanding of the concept of multiplication and how it relates to skip counting and repeated addition. I will be uploading our skip counting songs to our Google Classroom this week so your students will have access to those for their Math Menu.
- Reading: The kids have been enjoying our realistic fictions stories. We have ready Judy Moody, Mood Martian, Stink and the Freaky Frog Freak Out, and Marisol McDonald Doesn't Match. We have been working on point of view, literary elements, figurative language, and theme. These are some important reading skills that we will focus on all year and the kids are already doing a wonderful job with all of them! Please continue to read at home for at least 30 minutes every night and track your minutes on the monthly reading log for September!
- Social Studies: We have started our study of Colorado History by reading The Capitol Ghost Mystery where Silvie goes on a mission during her school field trip to the Colorado State Capitol to find out who stole the Abraham Lincoln portrait! Throughout our reading we will research different aspects of Colorado's history which include the Gold Rush, women's impactful roles, and how Denver has changed from past to present. We will wrap up this unit of study with a trip to the state captiol! The date for this field trip will be coming soon!
- Writing: The kids have been brainstorming and reflecting on their summer vacations! They have chosen one story to write about for a personal narrative. We have brainstormed and are now ready to begin drafting. I can't wait to read all about their fun summer adventures! Along with personal narratives, we have been working on parts of and types of sentences. We will also learn about dialogue and how to include quotation marks in our writing.
- Foundational Skills: These skills include phonemic awareness and phonics. We have started working on long vowel spellings. The kids have mastered the use of magic (or sneaky) -e which leads us into working with vowel teams. This week we will focus on the long a and long e spellings. We will also introduce generative vocabulary (working with affixes) by introducing the prefixes mis- and un-. I am very excited for this work because the kids will get to play with words and explore different parts of our language!