Monday, April 8, 2013

3rd Trimester!

Dear Families,

Wow, I can't believe how quickly the year is going.  We are now in the third and final trimester.  This week are parent-teacher conferences.  I am looking forward to meeting up with each of you to talk about how your child has done during second trimester.  Also, during this week we will be having the buy 1 get 1 free book fair.  I have also sent home book orders, if you are interested in ordering through the scholastic book order please send it in by Friday.  Friday has become a school day now because of the amounts of snow days that we have had this winter.  So, April vacation starts April 13-21.  I hope that you are able to enjoy some beautiful weather during break!  Below I have writing 3rd trimester's benchmarks.


Reading

*Reads at a level 16 or 18, according to the   
Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA).
*Uses multiple strategies for solving unknown words 
like: picture clues, rereading the sentence, reading 
for meaning or applying phonics to decode words.
*When reading out loud, student reads in 5-6 word 
phrases and uses punctuation to change their voices.
*Works to make predictions, retell, make connections, 
ask and answer questions about
 a story.
*Identifies the characters, setting, problem 
and solution in a story.
*Identifies the headings, table of contents and 
glossery in a nonfiction text.
*Reads 90-100 of the first grade sight words.

Writing
*Writes 5-6 simple sentences on a topic.
*Uses adjectives (descriptive words) in sentences.
*Uses punctuation at the end of a sentence and 
capitalizes the first word of a sentence, names of 
people and the word I.
*Uses appropriate spacing between words.
*Begins to spell words with common spelling patterns.

Math

*Solves problems that require the addition of 3 whole 
numbers (2+3+5=).
*Uses strategies like counting on, doubles, +/- 1, 
counting back and fact families to solve addition and 
subtraction problems.
*Adds or subtracts 10 math problems accurately in 2 
minutes.
*Reads, writes and compares numbers to 120.
*Measures obects to the nearest whole unit.
*Reads and writes time to the hour and half hour.
*Answers simple questions about a graph.
*Describes, names and compares 2-D and 3-D shapes.
*Divides circles and rectangles into halves and 
quarters.

Spelling

We will be replacing the challenge words with a 
sentence that will be dictated to the children.  We will 
expect kids to use appropriate upper and lower case 
letters.  We will be looking for letters to be sitting 
properly on the line and for appropriate spacing between 
the words.  These are conventions that we have been 
working on with our handwriting program.  We have also 
talked about these conventions during our writing time.