What’s ahead for 2019?

We have had an amazing beginning to our school year! I am so impressed with the way the students have mastered our classroom routines. They are so independent during literacy centers and are able to think deeply about what they are learning! I hope everyone has a wonderful and relaxing winter break!!

Below are some of the new topics the students will study in 2019.

Reading and Vocabulary

In the new year, our big focus will be on reading for meaning. The students will be asked what they learned from the passages they read and will need to provide evidence from the text for their ideas. We will also practice making inferences based on clues in the author left in the story.

Our final phonics skills will be:

oi, oy like in oil and toy

au, aw like in audience and awkward

ou, ow like in ouch and cow

ew, ui like in stew and cruise

The students will also practice breaking longer words apart into syllables to make them easier to read.

Our big focus for vocabulary will be using context clues around an unknown word to determine the word’s meaning.

Spelling

The students will study many ways to make words plural, like the following examples:

girl- girls

fox- foxes

child- children

city- cities

half- halves

The students will learn to double the final consonant on short vowel words before adding a suffix like “ed” or “ing”. For example, stop becomes stopped or stopping. For long vowel words, like grade, the students will learn to drop the final “e” before adding a suffix. Grade becomes graded or grading.

Writing

Our writers will focus on new genres and traits in their work. We will write nonfiction essays to go with our science curriculum on the life cycle of animals like chickens or frogs and insects like butterflies. They will study and write poetry while focusing on using strong words and inserting their “voice.”

Math

Our next unit will cover 2D and 3D shapes. This unit has a lot of vocabulary: Line segment, polygon, ray, parallel, rhombus, trapezoid, quadrangle and quadrilateral, rectangular prism, and more! The students will participate in many hands-on activities to study the shapes and their role in the world around us.

Art

On this Tuesday, December 11, the students began their art block which will continue each afternoon until February 1^st. Our awesome art teacher, Mrs. Lerner, integrates our science and social studies curriculum into her class. We have begun with a project to recreate the urban skyline of Jerusalem as a multi-colored collage. Once our art block is over the students will begin a project based learning science unit on natural resources.