Week of April 10th, 2012

Welcome Back!

I hope you had a wonderful Spring Break!

Reminder: I am hoping to attend some of the students' extra curricular functions.  Feel free to send me any dates or schedules for anything your student may be participating in before the end of the school year!

This week we...

Literacy: 

Reading: We finished our mystery book club books before spring break, so we started a new reading activity this week.  We will be reading, practicing, and performing poems for two or three voices from the book Joyful Noise.  The poems are all from the perspective of insects so they are particularly fun to read!

Writing:  We continued poetry this week by writing "What Am I?" poems.  We hadn't done poetry with rhyme in a while, so this one includes this element.  These poems are fun because we are keeping them secret while we write them so when we are done we can read them to our groups and guess what object or thing we wrote a poem about.  I read examples about a baseball, bowling pin, battery and a potato.  The students are coming up with some really awesome, creative ideas!

Math:

We continue to work on money and decimals this week.  We started the week by learning how to write out numbers in words in preparation for our checkbook activity coming up!  We also learned how to fill out a check and balance our checkbook registers.  In our problem solving journals we started working on multi-step and multi-operation word problems.  It was a busy but fun week!

Social Studies:

We started a new unit this week about the United States' Westward Movement.  We will be doing a Pioneer activity for the rest of the year in which we are divided into wagon trains and work on making it to the end of the "Hacker Trail" by completing tasks related to learning about American pioneers. It will be a really fun unit!  

Exciting News!

For the next two weeks I will be doing my "lead teaching" weeks.  This means I will be planning and teaching everything, everyday for two weeks to the students.  Even though I have already gotten the opportunity to lead full days and plan and lead multiple units, I am very excited to be teaching your students in the coming weeks!  If you have any questions or concerns, I can always be reached by e-mail at koeble@wisc.edu!