We have arrived at our first full week of school! We have completed rules, procedures, getting to know you activities, and organizational tasks last week, and are ready to jump into some real learning. Here are some important upcoming dates:
Wednesday, August 17th- Summer Reading Forms are due
Friday, August 19th- Behavior Guide Forms are due
Tuesday, August 23rd- Bookmobile
Wednesday, August 24th- early dismissal at 2:50

Check out what we are learning in class this week:
ELA- Each day we start our lesson with a 10 minutes Working with Words lesson. We learn sound patterns, prefixes, suffixes, sight words, etc. I am currently pulling students back to read through first quarter sight words with me. I will send home a list of words to practice shortly after I identify which words your child still needs to practice reading. Later this week, we will begin focusing on our new sound pattern: -aunch. We will begin taking a spelling test over words with these sound patterns every other week. Our first test will be August 26th.

We then move on to a mini-lesson focused on a new reading skill. This week we are focusing on using text details to identify characteristics of a character in a story. An example is saying that Dr. Koeneker (our principal) is goofy when he let fourth and fifth grade students throw water balloons at him for earning high standardized test scores last year. Students are also given a chance to do independent/small group practice of this skill. Check out the following links to practice at home:

1. Character Traits practice (scroll down to “characterization”)
2. Character traits video
3. Practice Quiz

Science:
This week we set-up our science notebooks. We are also starting our unit: Matter! This correlates with chapter 7 in our science book. We are learning what matter is, how we can describe matter, and what density it. Check out the following for more practice:

1. What is Matter? video
2. Matter Sorter game
3. Density simulator

As always, please let me know if you have any questions!