Telling Time and Conducting Experiments

Friday, January 20

Dear Parents and Guardians,

We had a tearful goodbye to Lilliana last week. I was touched by the deep emotion that students had about her leaving and the kind parting words that they had for her. If your child would like to write her a letter or card, I can make sure that it gets delivered.

As far as I can tell, no one submitted an order for the book orders that were due today. If I somehow overlooked your order or you would like more time, please let me know. I will send home another round in February. We will not have spelling words next week since there is no school on Friday.

Reading

This is our last week working on our unit on Wondering and Questioning about narrative books (books with a story line). Please see the letter on the back for a description of the unit and ideas about how to support the work at home. Our next unit is also on Wondering and Questioning, but we will be focusing on biographies of famous people as a whole class. Individually, students will continue reading narrative books but may choose to also try out biographies on their own too.

Writing

This week, we began a unit on writing fiction. We are starting the unit by brainstorming together and by making sure that students feel successful and excited about their writing. We also discussed compound sentences and how you can make your writing better by combining sentences with a conjunction like and, but, or or.

Math

This week we have focused on time, as you probably saw. The strategy we worked on to help students tell time and understand elapsed time is by drawing it on a number line. We are also using our multiplication and addition to figure out the minutes. This is a great skill to practice at home by reading the time and then figuring out how long it will be until an event or activity or how long was it since we started an activity? Next week we will start to work on measuring volume. It is still helpful to practice math facts at home with xtramath.org.

Science

Students continued to refine their experimental designs for a force and motion experiment this week. They created lab reports to keep track of the steps of the experiment: the question, hypothesis, procedure, results, and conclusion. Find out what your child learned from his/ her experiment. Next week students will continue to study force and motion, this time by considering some of the forces involved in designing a bridge. As an activity we will be designing and testing our own bridges made of paper. One fun thing you can do to support next week’s learning is to sit down together with your child and enjoy browsing through some of the world’s most intriguing and extraordinary bridges.

Second Step

In our social-emotional curriculum, we have been learning about dealing with disappointments and accusations. The first step is always to use a calming strategy so that you can then come up with a solution to the problem. Try practicing these steps at home: calm down, brainstorm solutions, and fix the problem.

Yours truly,

Jessica Harwood