News from Mrs. Tottempudi's class
Math:
We spent the month of October learning about Place Value and learning how to develop our number sense. In this unit, we learned the difference between digits and numbers and that the position of a digit affects its value. We also learned to represent numbers in standard, written, pictorial and expanded form. We completed this unit and took the post-test. I'll share the scores with you during conferences.
I make sure I give the students time to go on Xtramath.com to practice math facts in class twice a week. When students are able to recall math facts quickly, it helps students solve problems with speed and accuracy. Please have your child practice math facts by logging on to the website, Xtramath.com (your child should know the login and password) OR use flashcards. Anything you can do to help them memorize fcts will be beneficial. You can also use the following links to download practice sheets to memorize facts.
Addition worksheets link
https://www.dadsworksheets.com/worksheets/addition-spaceship-math.html
Subtraction worksheets link
https://www.dadsworksheets.com/worksheets/subtraction-spaceship-math.html
Our next unit in math is addition and subtraction with regrouping. As in the previous unit, I'll do a weekly check-in to make sure your child is on track with their learning. Please look out for the weekly activity lists and ask you child about what they learned with each activty he/she chose. Some main concepts we will learn in this unit are:
- Addition and Subtraction Strategies.
- Adding multiple addends ( more than two)
- Inverse Operations ( Using addition to check Subtraction, Using subtraction to check addition)
- Reading data from a table and manipulating the given information to find the answer.
- Rounding numbers to estimate.
- Writing their own addition and subtraction story/word problems and solving it.
Our book reports turned out great for the month of October! Thank you for helping your child stay on track with their work. For our next book report we will be using a nonfiction text. If your child doesn't have one at home to use, please remind him/her to check one out from the school library. You can also email me if your child would like to borrow a book from our class library.
We learned strategies called the Fab-Four to help us read any genre of books. The Fab-Four strategies are clarifying unkown words, keeping track of questions, predicting what will happen next in the text, and summarizing. We used the format, Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then.. to summarize a fiction text. We will learn to summarize a nonfiction text in our next reading unit.
Our next reading unit focuses on reading nonfiction texts. We learned how to navigate a nonfiction text by using text features. We also made a poster that your child will bring home soon so he/she could use it as a resource at home. To help us get aquainted with this unit, we started a new routine called, "An Article a Day". We read a nonfiction article everyday and write down at least three things we learned from it. Please look for a packet of articles and a sheet of notes at the end of every week. We will learn to identify text structures and use that to summarize a nonfiction text.
Writing:
We just finished our first writing unit, "Personal Narratives" . We wrote about a small moment from our lives. These are a few strategies we learned to improve our craft.
- Revising our lead to hook our readers in.
- Using Show,Don't tell to explain both emotion and setting in a story.
- Use DANT- Dialogue, action, narration, and internal thought.
- Sentence structure - Every sentence has a subject and predicate.
- Punctuation rules.
- Capitalization rules.
Science:
We are done with our first unit, Life Cycle and Adaptations. I sent home a Parent Cheat Sheet to help you prepare your child to study for the test which will be on Novenber 16th. Your child should have also brought home their science notebook and folder to help them study. Pleae reach out if you have any questions.
We will be starting withour Social Studies unit, Map Skills when we return from November break.