Mrs. Henry's Classroom: Newsletter 12/14/18

In Reading Workshop this week, we strengthened our reading muscles by attempting to increase our stamina. Every student received a reading mat with two sides: one to pile up the books to read and the other side for finished books to read again. When we have a reading plan, we don't waste time searching for books to read, but pick up the next one in our pile.

In Writing Workshop we learned how to support our stories with illustrations that match. We also learned how to end a story. We don't want to leave our readers wondering!

We worked on retelling the story of how Baby Echo learned to fly in our phonics lessons. We are sequencing events and trying to include character emotions while retelling. We also learned new sight words, "what" and "went". We had fun reading "Jingle Bells" and searching for the "ing" cluster within words.

We did another problem solving Exemplar this week. One day, we solved it with various manipulative models (see below) and then next day we showed our problem solving on paper.

In Second Steps, we learned that we can tell how someone is feeling by looking at his/her face. We studied pictures of people and tried to guess their feelings. Then we reacted to imaginary situations and tried to guess how one another were feeling. We are working toward reading one another's body language, so that we may be better friends.

The Hour of Code was this week and we coded with our 5th Grade Buddies in the Library!

Polar Express Day was such a blast! We read the story, made our own version of the book, made jingle bells and wrote about what we would wish for.

News and Notes: