Week of January 4-6

Dear families,

Happy New Year and welcome back to school! We are having a busy, short week here in room 109.
We have gotten back into the swing of school the last two days. We began yesterday by sharing what we did over our winter break. We wrote New Year books about our goals for 2017. Many students wrote about reading and writing goals.

This week we read the book Matthew and Tilly by Rebecca C. Jones. We read the story and practiced retelling the story orally. We talked about connections to the book after reading. We wrote about "Text to self" connections, a new comprehension strategy we will be working on the next few weeks.

We are finishing up our writing unit called Writing for Readers. Today students chose a piece of writing to "fancy up" by fixing spelling and punctuation. We also added color illustrations to our stories. We shared some of our stories in class. We will begin a new unit of writing next week called How-to or procedural writing.

In science we are nearing the end of the Solids and Liquids unit. This week we will work with solids in containers. Next week we will explore mixtures and solutions. We will put several different solids (candy, a cookie, rock salt) in water to watch them dissolve completely then evaporate over several days. We will observe how the water changed the solid. It will be exciting to see what is left after the water evaporates! This is also a fun experiment to try at home!

In math, we have just completed unit 4. We will have a cumulative test tomorrow which will cover units 3 and 4. We will begin unit 5 next week. Look for a family letter to come home detailing the specifics of what we will be learning.

Have a great night!
Mrs. Scheck