class news

Hi parents! Hope you stayed cozy and safe during the bomb cyclone. Below is an overview of what we worked on this week and last week.

We kicked off our dinosaur unit! These kids are very curious and enthusiastic about dinos.  We started by writing what we knew about dinosaurs. Some kids wrote that they knew that dinosaurs lived a long time ago. Others wrote about specific dinosaurs. Then we wrote what we wanted to learn more about. These kids had great questions! We’ll be using these questions to drive our study.

We looked at the different books we had on dinosaurs and tried to identify which were fiction and which were nonfiction. In this unit, we’ll be using many nonfiction books and learning how to use text features to find the answers to our questions about dinosaurs. When reading with your child at home, ask them if they can tell if the book is fiction or nonfiction and ask them to explain how they know.

We also started reading Dinosaurs Before Dark, the first book of the Magic Tree House series. It’s about a brother and sister who find a magic tree house and go back in time to the Cretaceous period. This book is fabulously suspenseful, but also really great for helping the kids visualize and learn new vocabulary. After each chapter, we’ll work with a partner to retell the story using the five-finger retell.

We learned that estimating is an important skill for making good guesses about how much of something there is. We used an estimation bagthat is filled with dinosaurs and the kids estimated how many dinos they thought there were and wrote it on a sticky note. There was also a “helper bag” that has 10 of the item inside, which gives them a visual of a known quantity.  We counted the items in the jar as a whole class, grouping objects by 10s in Ziploc bags as we counted them to see how accurate our estimates were. We’ll be doing the estimation jar each week to build up our estimation skills! Below is a link to an article that came out a few years ago in Time magazine that talks about the importance of estimation. I like to share it with parents because it does a nice job of telling how estimation builds number sense and problem solving strategies. And it’s a quick read. :)

http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/23/why-guessing-is-undervalued

You can help your child develop this skill by asking them to estimate how many goldfish they have and how they made their guess. Or how many people they think are in a crowded restaurant, anything like that. Estimation can happen everywhere!

Specials Next Week:
Mon. Music

Tues. Spanish

Wednes. PE

Thurs. Spanish

Fri. Music

Hope to see many of you at the auction tonight! Have a great weekend!