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.