Diving In - Again

Hello one and all! I am ready to dive in again after a great Spring Break! I hope it was delightful for all of you. I apologize that this blog has not been updated recently, but hopefully we are now back on track.

A few heads up for our classroom:

• I am looking for a child's wading pool and glass baby food bottles for our "Earth Materials" unit that we will be starting right away. If you could donate either (and we could return them) I would appreciate it.
• Before Spring Break the students earned a Show-and-Tell. We will be having it on Tuesday morning. Please send something that is important to your child.
• We are starting a new study of Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and Plays. Because of this your child will no longer have a baggy book. I will try to ensure that all students have an appropriate library book to be reading at home. Please continue to read for 20 minutes a night and mark it on the calendar in the homework folder. Also look forward to a script coming home that your child will be memorizing for our upcoming readers-theater performance.

April is just around the corner and we have some hefty goals for learning. Each of you made a goal with your student at parent teacher conferences and we will be working diligently on those. We will also continue working on comprehension strategies and focusing on Summarizing and Synthesizing in reading.

Many students have a goal to improve their handwriting, and therefore non-readable handwriting will no longer be accepted. Expect writing and re-writing if your student has handwriting as a goal. As far as content goes, our focus in writing is still on paragraphing and using descriptive language.

Our current math unit is "Putting Together and Taking Apart." It is a focus on addition and subtraction of multiple digit numbers. We are still working with horizontal number sentences, but will be introducing vertical number sentences to reinforce place value. Students DO NOT yet understand carrying and borrowing like we were taught it (cross out the number add a one... etc.) so PLEASE do not teach them this way yet. They first need to understand how to break units in a tangible sense.

As I mentioned earlier, we are moving into a new science investigation. We will be studying earth materials such as types of dirt (soil, loam, clay) and types of rock and their properties. We get to make mud pies, test the material for properties like weight, crumbly-ness, color, acidic-ness, and learn about fossils. We will continue this investigation all month long.

If you have any needs or questions please feel free to contact me.
abiles@jeffco.k12.co.us
-Amanda Biles