Writing: After finishing up our wonderful How To writing last week,  we are hard at work on small moment stories again. We are studying some of our favorite authors to learn how to make our stories even better. We’ve learned to choose story topics that have big feelings such as: getting lost, getting a wonderful surprise, losing a favorite toy, going exploring, and more. Our stories are now 4 pages long and we are learning how to fill the extra lines with great details.

Reading: Now that we are getting to be such good readers, we are learning how to fix our reading mistakes all by ourselves. We can stretch words carefully, reread the sentence or page, think about what makes sense, and check the pictures for help. We know that good readers use more than one strategy and we keep trying until we figure out tricky parts.

Math: We started Unit 5, Place Value Situations, in math this week. The first part of this unit will extend our learning as we work to solve story problems involving teen numbers. Story problems can be confusing so we always follow several steps when solving these problems. After reading the story problem carefully, we check to see if the numbers in the story are partners or a total. We use these numbers in a math mountain or equation and then we solve for the missing number. After we are finished we check to see if our answer makes sense. We have discovered that sharing our thinking in this process is so important. Thank you for continuing to help with your child’s math homework. This practice at home is a great way to strengthen these concepts.