Thank you for taking the time to meet with me for our parent teacher conferences. I find myself short on time this week and so am sending home a list of things we have accomplished.  Hopefully you’ll have the opportunity to talk to your child about what’s here and he or she can add in more information and details.

Here are some of the things we’ve been doing:

Math

• We learned how to read and record time on analogue clocks.
• We’ve plotted points on a number line to represent elapsed time and we’ve learned how to calculate elapsed time by adding on and subtracting.
• We learned how to write elapsed time problems.
• We’ve spent a portion of each day with math activities designed to help us become more automatic with facts.

S.E.L.

• We read a variety of Aesop’s fables and considered how the morals apply to our lives.
• We worked with Mrs. Haight to marbleize paper in much the same way as Leo Lionni.  We will be using the papers we make to create collages for our original fables.
• Mr. Caron challenged us with The Magic Hoop.  It seems so simple, but it actually requires a lot of concentration, cooperation and self-control.

Social Studies

• We are learning about maps.  We are exploring different types of maps and learning about the features that are common on all maps.
• We have begun to read about different places in the world to discover how we are the same and how we are different.

Reading and Writing

• We have continued to explore different formats of informational writing – descriptive, sequential and compare/contrast.
• We have also looked at craft moves (creative choices) that authors make so their writing is unique.  Some create characters to talk to readers.  Some share information before the title of the book and use the title as part of their introduction.  Others share information in fun fact boxes on the pages.
• The children have each begun a first draft of their own informational writing.  Once begun, most found they had a lot of information to share.
• Many of the children added a new post to his or her blog.  They would LOVE to have to read them and leave a comment.
• We completed our third group of cursive letters – the Loop Group.
• We are continuing to document our thinking while listening to Nuts To You, our current chapter read aloud.  It is full of interesting and different craft moves.
• Each of the children has been reading and recording their own independent reading of chapter books, picture books and graphic novels.