October 9

Last week was the BEST, best, best week of school yet!! I’m not sure if you have heard but this group is super, duper social ya’ll. Like I mean, every single one of them is BFF’s and not only are they social but they are extremely creative. Put social and creative together and well, let’s just say: we.like.to.talk. 
A lot.
Like always.


But have no fear, after pulling out every strategy I know, mountains of positive behavior reinforcement, and making sure the morning begins with Art Start and allowing for plenty of time to work with our hands, giving each other feedback, and teaching each other how to do things using dry erase markers on tables; we have channeled al of that social talk to some pretty amazing academic conversations. Ask your child about math hash tagging. It’s brilliant (for me at least because they wait their turn to talk in a very excited way). 


This week in Superkids, we are learning the spelling pattern that makes there /er/ sound: ar, ear and or. This is VERY tricky because the children know these combinations as making other sounds. Because these spelling patterns are so tricky, their memory words will also be spelling pattern words. Please have your child spend some extra time this week reading and writing these words. Ask your child to write their pattern words and sort them by pattern.
Your child will be able to: 
Read words with or/ėr/, ear/ėr/, ar/ėr/
Associate ed with /ed/, /d/, /t/ 
Recognize -ed ending indicates past tense of verbs
Encode words with and without spelling changes before adding -ing and -ed
Add -er, -est to compare things 
Add -ed, -er, -es, -est, and -ing to words with final y


In literacy groups, children are done reading Issue 2 of the Super Magazine and we are starting our second book club. We are reading Henry and Mudge. We are REALLY focusing on comprehension and slowing down. Many of us are rushing through our reading. I have told the children “We don’t read to race, we read to understand.” One of the strategies we are working on, is stopping after each page and asking ourself a who/what/when/where/why question. As a class, our comprehension scores are low and we have made a goal to have a GROWTH mindset and think about how we can get better. We know we need to stop, be thoughtful and think about what we are reading. You can help your child at home by having your child summarize whatever they may be reading to you at home. This is an excellent thing to do with chapter books. I will find some comprehension resources to send home too.


This week in Writing, children will continue our poetry unit and recognize and use onomatopoeia in a poem of their own. The children will also recognize alliteration and begin drafting a poem that used alliteration. Ask your child to imagine being at a sports game and then make a list of words that use onomatopoeia that they would hear.


In math, we are hard at work on Unit 2. We have been studying Geometry. We have no longer been calling simple shapes triangles, rectangles ect. They are instead POLYGONS! Don’t think about calling a square a square. No, way.. it is a quadrilateral. Ask your child: what is another name for a quadrilateral (they should be able to quickly tell you at least 5: any shape with 4 sides) and what are the attributes of a quadrilateral. Also, ask your child, what is a polygon (no curves, straight lines, no intersecting lines, closed shape). This week, we will discuss arrays and my hopes is that we will master this quickly and I can move them into a geometry project based unit with legos. Stay tuned…


So sorry I am behind on uploading pictures. I promise to do so very soon!