Next week's news...it is an exciting week as we are welcoming children's poet Amy Ludwig VanDerwater to our school!  Monday-Wednesday, she will meet with kindergartners and 1st graders to share ideas about poetry.  On Thursday, she will work with our 1st grade students specifically on developing their own poems.  Please visit her website for more information:  http://www.poemfarm.amylv.com/.
Thank you to our PTO and the East Grand Rapids Schools Foundation for providing funding for this special treat.  Authentic learning with real writers is profoundly beneficial in developing our young students' minds (and teachers' minds, too)!

Math news...coming home today, I am sending a few math games/vocabulary sheets home from our fourth unit of subtraction strategies.  These are for you to keep at home and pull out from time to time.  We will begin learning how subtraction sentences relate to addition sentences (9-7=2, 2+7=9) and how you can use addition to solve subtraction problems.

Science news...we are sorting, sorting, sorting by all sorts of properties.  So far, we know that we can sort by color, size, shape, weight, texture and if an object is magnetic or not.  We will dive deeper into magnets next week!

Writing news...our informational writing continues with our teaching books, turning them into informational chapter books next week.  We've been learning about how text features, such as captions, fun facts, labels and headings make our information books more interesting.  We are writing, writing, writing and they have become so independent these last few weeks!

Reading/writing news...We are learning more about reading and writing important "fancy" words by breaking up words into syllables (clapping them out to hear the chunks) and recognizing compound words that can be broken down into two smaller words.  When they ask you how to spell words at home in their writing, try these two strategies.  They are very helpful in making your writer feel successful.  We've also noticed that those sneaky silent e words have been on the prowl.  We've been finding them in all sorts of places:  in names, in poems, in stories.  Recognizing these patterns in words and the relationship between them (mat becomes mate, can becomes cane...) helps our readers decipher unfamiliar words in their reading just a little more.