Have a great vacation!

Thanks to all those parents who made it to the PTA yesterday. It is really good to be working together as a team for your child. If you were not able to make it, you can still arrange a time with the school office to meet during school hours.

Our class is really looking forward to our winter vacation and spending some time with our families. I have kept homework minimal, so the children can use this time to relax and refresh. My goals for the week of vacation for each child are: to read 10 mins everyday and do some draft writing. Other than that, they only have 2 standard friday homeworks, which should not take longer than one nights homework or less.

Enjoy and looking forward to seeing everyone in 2011!

Morah Rivki

Interviewing...

Today we interviewed Morah Jessica! Morah Jessica has worked in nature centers and did a great job of answering all our questions...

Then we wrote a list of all the topics we want to include in our draft and we made sure that we have all the information we need...

Now we're ready to begin drafting!

Social Studies: Our Country

We have learned so much about New York State! Some of the topics we have covered are: September 11th 2001, geography and NYS flag. Our key words have been: freedom, patriotism, heroes, landscapes and symbolism.

Now we are starting our new unit on Our Country - The USA. We will be covering: American Symbols, national parks, national holidays, american presidents, USA flag, growth in America, American leaders and patriotic songs.

We will be bringing home letters to our parents about what we are learning and mini-projects to do. The projects will be due for the following social studies class on wednesday... Its a really nice opportunity for your child to discuss with you what they know and reinforce what we have been learning!

Our "Readerly" Lives

When we are reading lots of us have this question: "What does this word mean?"

It is so good to have questions when we are reading because that shows that we are really thinking about the text!


And over these couple of weeks we have discovered strategies in which we can independantly figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word:

• Look out for the base word. If i know the base word then I can figure out the meaning together with the prefix and suffix too...


• Look out for compound words - 2 words joined together. If we know what each one means seperately then we can probably figure out the meaning of the compound.


• Look out for Idioms and sayings. They dont have literal meanings.
  
• Look out for context clues. There are so many unfamiliar words that we can understand when we look at the sentences and ideas around it...
  

We are practicing these strategies in our independant reading. And if your child asks "What does this mean?", see if they can use one of the above to figure it out...

Our Trip to Brooklyn Historical Society

We found the program "It Happened in Brooklyn" very interesting and our tour guides were so informative - we learned lots of new information. It was an experience for us being in the oldest Brooklyn Exhibit, that was made for people to research and learn about brooklyn in the 1900's!

Middah of the Week - Vatranus - Giving in...

The Middah we learnt this week is a hard one and we're looking forward to seeing how we can carry it out...

Vatranus: Giving in to others even when we really badly want something. For example letting someone go before us or giving up something we want for somebody else...

Trip to Intrepid - 19th Jan

We will be travelling together with 4th grade by school bus at 9:30am and arriving back to school at 1:30pm.

We will be having a special school 'Aviation Workshop' program there:

About our program - "UP, UP and AWAY": The science of flight comes to life as students tour the ship's Flight Deck to discover how nature influenced airplane shape and design. Participating in demonstrations of the four forces of flight, students experiment with the concepts before creating their own flying vessels.

We're looking forward to this new and exciting experience!