Ms. Mottaz's Class: Happy Friday!

Happy Friday! We have had a great week!

Important Information

Both Mrs. Ross and myself will be gone to the Powerful Learning Conference on Monday and Tuesday next week. Ms. Easter will be here, along with two familiar substitutes to the students.

If there are any changes to how your child is getting home on Monday & Tuesday, please contact the office (214-3290).

This week, we started a new math unit on collecting and using data. The students learned how to turn data collected into a bar and a pictograph (picture graph). We've also been solving word problems based on the information in graphs and charts.

The questions "How many more ____ than ____?" or "How much shorter is ____ than ____?" have been challenging for students

Next week, we will continue to work on solving number stories and will also be learning about ballpark estimates. A ballpark estimate is the idea of rounding numbers to the closest 10, or for some students the nearest 5, so that they can quickly estimate the answer. The numbers that we are working on adding are 2-digit numbers, so we are going to continue to talk about strategies to solve these numbers.

This week, we have worked incredibly hard on publishing our first informational book! The students identified the best text feature to go with each chapter (page) in their book. These are turning out really great!
We have started writing a speech for a book trailer for our book. We will be working on this next week also, and will be using the iPads and a green screen during the week of February 4 to make our videos.

This week, we finished up Unit 8. This unit introduced writing the r-controlled vowels of ar and or/ore. We took a test over Unit 8 yesterday and this test is coming home in your child's backpack today.
Today we started Unit 9 and this unit continues to work on r-controlled vowels. We now will be focusing on er, ir and ur. These are tricky because they all make the same sound. We learned about a section in our Monster Book called "Spelling Options" - this section has an alphabetical list of words that can not be tapped out. We practiced using this today.

We are continuing to work on comparing texts. This week we read four different books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and compared information within the books. We also discovered that the author makes a difference also because we learned different stories about his childhood from the book My Brother Martin written by Christine King Farris.
Next week, we are going to compare fairy tales and folk tales from different points of view.

We are going to be cartographers for the next month and studying maps. We will be learning about the continents and oceans on the world map and land forms and smaller bodies of water on the Missouri map.

I hope that you have a wonderful weekend and stay warm!