Communities

With our Me on the Map Social Studies unit, we are learning where we are in the world. This week, we drew a diagram showing ourselves in the middle and expanding through our neighborhood, town, state, country, and the world. Next week, we will complete a model booklet showing where we are on the map. We will begin learning about the types of communities (urban, suburban, and rural). Read the study guide on the back of the newsletter to get ideas on how to reinforce learning at home! 

Fables

We have been reading fables this week and taking notes on their characteristics. We have learned a few things about fables that your child will need to know.

Fables....

Are a type of fiction folktale genre.

Always have talking animals.

Have characters who learn a lesson, called a moral. 

Were mostly written by a man called Aesop. 

Folktales, like fables, were written long ago and were first stories that were told and passed down from generation to generation. (We have discussed how long ago, families didn't have the technology that we have today, so they told stories for fun. This is how folktales began.)

Below are a few of the fable titles we have read this week. 

Place Value

This week we are learning all about place value (ones, tens, hundreds and so on). I want everyone to know these two very important things...

1. Place Value is the position and value of a digit in a number. The position, or place, where the digit is located in a number determines its value.

Example - In the number 58, 5 means 5 tens or 50. 8 means 8 ones or just 8. 

(You will see these types of problems on homework this week!)

2. A digit is any single number 0-9!!!! 

Place Value is so important in helping us make sense of addition and subtraction, so please.. Study Study Study!!!  

In this example, 64 is represented with place value blocks. We are working with place value blocks in class all week to show our numbers. 

Owl Moon - What do you hope for?

After reading the beginning of the story Owl Moon with Mrs. Linkous, we decided to finish the book later in the day and do some writing in response to the story. Each child keeps a reader's response journal where we keep our responsive writing, as well as notes on books we read together in class. Here are some general story elements we found together. 

The question we used for our writer's response was "What do you hope for and why?" We talked about what hope is and how we all hope for different things that are special to us. 

Growing Writers

One of my favorite parts about teaching 7 and 8 year olds is watching them grow into incredible writers. It always amazes me what they can do by the end of the year. We are starting to set up our Writer's Workshop. We will be focusing on the third CCSS writing standard dealing with personal narratives for the first 9 weeks. I am taking a writing class this year myself, so I'm excited to bring back what I'm learning and apply it in our classroom. Writing is one of those things that can be uncomfortable, sometimes even for us grown ups. I'm trying to teach our class this year that the ideas and stories we have for writing are already there in our minds! We just have to learn to pull them out. We all have great stories to tell! 

We had a great writing lesson this week on how to begin getting ideas for our writing. Mrs. Linkous came in to teach a lesson, and we had so much fun! I was so so SO impressed with everyone's writing! Mrs. Linkous read just the beginnings of Owl Moon and Whistle for Willie. She showed us how the authors began their stories, and we inferred where and how the author's could have gotten the ideas for these stories. Then we started writing some stories of our own! 

Why are numbers even & odd?

We started off the week with the question "What makes an odd number odd and an even number even?" Most of us know that odd numbers are odd if the ones place contains 1,3,5,7,9 and even when there is a 0,2,4,6,8... But what makes them odd/even? We learned two strategies to use when proving that a number is odd or even... the "pair up" strategy and the "divide into groups" strategy. Today we focused on the dividing strategy. Using even and odd numbers of cubes, we tried separating them into two groups to figure out what we noticed about even and odd numbers. We found that even numbers always had an equal number in each group, but odd numbers always had one more in one group. We made a chart with addition sentences to represent our findings. 

Talltales, Fables and Fairytales

You have probably been reading fantasy books to your child since before they can remember. They inspire imagination and big dreams, both of which are so important for creating healthy, happy children. Fantasy genres like folktales, talltales, fairytales and fables play a huge role in our new standards. They are the best for teaching story elements like plot, setting, characters and problem & solution. Over the next few weeks, we will do an intricate study of some of these genres, specifically talltales & fables. We will learn what makes stories a talltale and what makes them a fable. We will also be looking at different Cinderella stories across various cultures to explore the way that culture influences story telling and literature. You can begin to help your child over the next month by taking frequent trips to the library and checking out fables, talltales, fairytales, etc. Learn the characteristics of these and talk about them, write about them.. even play and act them out together (or film your child doing this.) Have your child READ OUT LOUD to you daily.. This supports building fluency and will enable them to become a strong, successful reader. 

This week we are reading Smoky Mountain Rose, an Appalachian Cinderella story. We are using this to introduce story elements and to see how the author creates emotions and feelings for the reader. We will revisit this story in several weeks as we learn about cultures and fairytales.