The Week Ahead 10/6-10/10



Students are off and reading for their realistic fiction genre study! On Monday, October 6th they will need to let me know what they will be using as a visual representation of their book. On Thursday, the children were sent home with a green paper that listed the guidelines for the presentation. This paper listed the items that are required to be covered in each presentation. In order to give students time to work on their book presentations they will not have to turn in reading logs on either of the following Mondays, 10/13 and 10/20. Spelling packets will still be sent home during those weeks.

Thank you to everyone who sent in materials for our engineering design activities. Also, thank you to the volunteers who came in on Monday and organized the supplies. This week students worked in groups to make a diving board out of dominoes. This activity was an introduction to cantilevers. Ask your child to name some examples of cantilevers. We also used an awesome website www.smallblueprinter.com to work on designing a house. Next week students will learn about arches and strong shapes.

The primary math curriculum we have been using, Engage NY is split up into seven modules. The first module has 19 lessons. This week we took the mid module assessment to get an idea of how the class is progressing with the material. Overall, I was pleased with the knowledge displayed by the students. The biggest improvement we could make as a class is to make sure to read the word problems closely. Many students missed problems not because of computation errors, but because of not fully answering a question or not doing exactly what the question said. Here is a website I mentioned in a previous post that gives you an idea of the focus of each module we will be studying http://www.oakdale.k12.ca.us/cms/page_view?d=x&piid=&vpid=1402228861002. On Monday we will be starting lesson 14 of the 1st module. If you ever want your student to do extra math have them use Moby Max http://www.mobymax.com/or1248.

In writing we have continued to work on narrative writing. Some of the things we have been focusing on are writing strong leads to grab the readers attention, using dialogue effectively, and using figurative language to give the reader a clear picture of the events in their mind. I'm very pleased with the willingness of this class to try all of the new strategies that are introduced each day. We are seeing good improvements in writing as a result.

Picture day will be on Tuesday, October 14th. On Friday students were sent home with the picture order forms.

Upcoming Dates
  • Monday, October 6th - Deadline to let Mr. Blanc know realistic fiction visual
  • Monday, October 6th - Reading Log and Spelling Packet due/Spelling Test
  • Friday, October 10th - No School - Teacher Inservice
  • Tuesday, October 14th - Picture Day
  • Wednesday, October 15th - Realistic Fiction Presentations
  • Friday, October 17th - Buddies
  • Wednesday, October 29th - Conferences 3 pm - 8 pm
  • Thursday, October 30th - Conferences 8 am - 8 pm

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