More Crafting!

We had another great week on Team Esprit!  We continue to work very hard, but we also had some time to get creative this week.  Sara Ahrens, a teacher at the Craft School and Ella's mom, came back to visit our classrooms.  We worked on a special clay project that will be coming home next month as a family gift. It was so nice to have an opportunity to be creative, work with different materials, and learn new art concepts. We think you will love the final product!  

This week in math, our focus has been on gaining experience with different types of graphs and using them as a way to organize and represent data.  We participated in two different surveys: an ice cream survey and a book genre survey. We then took the data and created picture graphs in partnerships. We transferred the information from the picture into a bar graph as well and analyzed the data.  Which type of graph does your child prefer: a picture graph or a bar graph?  Ask him or her why!

During our word study time, your children have been working very hard to notice spelling patterns in their words.  Each week they receive a list of words and sort them to find what is the same about the words in the group.  This becomes the spelling rule for the week!  During the rest of the week, the children do speed sorts, blind sorts, and closed sorts with a partner to practice the spelling the words and learning the spelling patterns.  Be sure to ask your child about his or her words for the week.  What's this week's spelling pattern?  Often the children bring home their words on Friday so they could demonstrate some of our different sorts for you!

In Writer's Workshop, we are up to our elbows in informational writing!  This week our focus on was on elaborating with details.  We looked at several mentor texts by nonfiction authors to see how they add more detail in their writing.  We noticed that authors elaborate using facts and imagery, providing examples and descriptions, and even telling small stories to teach about the topic.  We practiced using these strategies to tell more in our books.  How's your child's nonfiction book coming along?  Ask them about the different chapters they are writing and how their books are organized!

Reader's Workshop also has us immersed in nonfiction text.  We really love reading informational books and are amazed at the interesting facts we are learning!  This week we talked about reading and thinking about new information. To better understand and remember what we are reading, it is important to merge our thinking with new information we encounter.  We spent a lot of time reading informational text this week and looking for facts or ideas that were new learning.  We like to call these "WOW" facts. They are facts that might cause you to say "I never knew..., I learned...., I was surprised..., Wow..., I didn't know..." as you read. We jotted our new learning on sticky notes and had a great time sharing amazing facts!  Then we moved on to talking about our background knowledge (what we already know) and how that helps us to understand new information.  As we read, we filled out a t-chart with information we already knew and new learning.  Be sure to ask your child about his or her new learning this week.  What book was he or she reading at Reader's Workshop? What "WOW" fact did he or she learn?

Have a great weekend!