Weekly Newsletter for 12/13/13

Dear Room 4 Families,

Thank you for your continued support and involvement! Our Room 4 students have been busy with many fun activities this week. We helped our Mandarin kindergarten buddies with learning their shapes and creating pictures with various cut out shapes. We learned about immigrants/immigration and began learning a song about an immigrant starting out in America. We helped our Room 2 kindergarten buddies complete a holiday craft while increasing our reading confidence by mentoring a younger student.

We live in a world surrounded by technology. And we know that whatever field our students choose to go into as adults, their ability to succeed will increasingly hinge on understanding how technology works. But only a tiny fraction of us are learning computer science, and less students are studying it than a decade ago. That’s why our entire school joined in on the largest education event in history: The Hour of Code. During Computer Science Education Week, every one of our students will be amongst over 2 million worldwide spending one hour learning the basics. Today your child solved logic puzzles on tablets with a partner, which introduced the beginning concepts of programming.

If you would like to download and continue playing the game we started at home, you can download it here: http://light-bot.com/ There is a free version and a paid version available for both Apple and Android devices, as well as a version that can be played on a computer that has a flash enabled browser.

Friday, December 20th will be a minimum day. There is no school for the next two weeks due to winter break. We will return to school on Monday, January 6th.

English Language Arts

Working on: Possessive and plural nouns, parts of speech (noun, adjective, verb),  writing a persuasive letter, past tense verbs, and using a dictionary versus a thesaurus.
Next week’s spelling words: https://graceyou.com/2nd-3-4-click-clack-moo-cows-that-type/

Math
Currently on: Topic 9 – Adding two-digit numbers. Please review your child’s homework carefully to help them understand the concept of regrouping (trading 10 ones for 1 ten).