Weekly News - Update

• Wow! Where the week go. Students have been very busy working on their in class Science project, working with partners in reading, writing and math. It's been a very hectic week.
• Thank you to the boys and girls for making birthday cards for Colin. He is a little boy with Asperger's like syndrome. It all began when his mom asked him which friends he would like to invite to his birthday party and his reply was he didn't have any friends. His mom took to facebook to request birthday wishes for him. Thank you to Mrs. Poland for bringing this to my attention and for mailing the cards.
• Reading - This week we restructured our Reading Intervention time. I will be working with my strategic (yellow) group daily on accuracy and fluency. I will see the core (green) group once or twice a week as needed. Mrs. Vasey will take the intensive (red group) at this time. Mrs. Avila will also work with a small group on quick reads (fluency). During fluency my small group will be using a quick read. This consists of five short passages, two questions and a graphic organizer. Students follow three main steps each day. First they look at the story and underline any unfamiliar words and then read the story to themselves. Next I read the story to the children while they follow along silently. Finally they read the story for one minute and graph they score. After the lesson they go off and answer the questions. The accuracy group works on phonetic word patterns. Several skills are taught during a 25 minute lesson. A word pattern is introduced, students break words apart using phoneme/grapheme mapping, read words orally etc. during this time. Students were placed in these groups based on their Dibels testing. More information next week.
• Math - Students have been working on division using two digit divisors with base ten problems. We have been practicing on they white boards as well as the smartboard. Students come to the smartboard and demonstrate which method they used to solve the examples. We are all learning from watching each other solve these problems.
• Social Studies - This week students completed an assessment on the southern colonies. Next week they will begin working on chapter 7. More information next week.
• Science - Students are continuing with the rough draft of their natural disaster charts. they will continue to work on these for several more weeks. I will post as this in class projects moves forward.
• March Project - Criteria went home this week for the Power of Persuasion Project. It is due April 3rd. Students are to create a product (either a model or a poster of their product), make a flyer, commercial and write a persuasive essay to convince the reader to buy their product. This is a favorite project of many students. I have already heard of some of their very creative ideas. Have fun with this project.
• Writing - This week students learned how to write a persuasive essay through several power point lessons on the smartboard. We will continue with this topic next week. This lesson will help them when they begin to write the essay for their March project.
• It was very nice to talk with several of you at the PTA sponsored auction. Thank you for supporting the PTA. Your children benefit from the hard work of the Kent Heights PTA.

As always thank you for your continued support from the home front. It is truly appreciated. Enjoy your weekend!