Weekly Update

Dear Families,

We have had another great week in our classroom, filled with new learning opportunities.

In Writer’s Workshop, we revisited personal narratives and the elements of such stories. This time around, we will emphasize small moment personal narratives. These stories are told in a first person narrative and have an over-arching focus or topic. In other words, they are not a list of things that the narrator did over a long period of time. Rather, they are tiny moments in time, told with descriptive language. There is also a reason we are telling them. Perhaps, there was a suspenseful moment, or a problem. Perhaps something unexpected happened which changed the sequence of events. As the students explore these characteristics, they are encouraged to see the connections between reading and writing as they “Read as Writers” and “Write as Readers”.

The students also began their “Word Collection Baskets” this week. These word baskets contain adjectives, interesting verbs, examples of settings and characters. As we read as writers we discover examples of all of these above mentioned words, we add them to our growing collection. While we learn to quickly identify the various grammatical components, we also build very interesting stories as we can use these words to help us get ideas for our own narratives. We cannot wait to share some of the stories developing in our classroom.

In addition to starting our small moment narratives we also finished our letters to our Swedish pen pals. They all went out this week. The students did an amazing job writing interesting and fun letters to their new friends. Your child should have brought his/her letter home to share along with a copy of the letter received from Sweden. Please let me know if you did not see your child’s letter. I would be happy to send you a copy.

Parent-teacher conferences are coming up soon. All parents received a time-slot. Reminder notes are going home next week. Please let me know if you cannot make it and wish to re-schedule. I will do my best to accommodate everyone’s schedule.

Ask your child about:
• The HCS new web-site
• Pop-it
• Egghead (3rd graders math)
• The school wide evacuation drill to St. Jude’s (the students did a great job!)
• Science on the Smartboard
Please do not forget that your child’s first Vocabulary Assignment is coming home this week. It is due next Friday. I have posted the words on the wiki (Link Library) for your convenience.

Have a great weekend!
Regards,

Maria McCormack