Class+News

Mrs. Halliday's Corner We are starting out the year strong with many exciting things we are studying. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. My email is kaipson@graniteschools.org. Here are some things we will be studying for the first quarter of school. Thanks! Mrs. Halliday

Math We will start out the year in math with working on addition and subtraction within 1,000. This unit will include rounding to the nearest ten and hundred, mental math strategies for addition and subtraction, adding and subtracting with numbers up to three digits (including with regrouping) and using charts to help figure out how to do story problems. We will then move on to our data and graph unit. It will include reading and making three types of graphs: picture graphs, bar graphs, and line plots. We will also discuss how to collect data and how to record it on frequency tables and tally charts. If you have any questions on the math homework, please let me know and I would be happy to help.

Science and Social Studies Because of our busy schedule, we will usually be doing either science or social studies at any given time. We will start the year with our social studies unit of mapping and communities. We will learn about what a community is, how to be good citizens and the basic role of government. We will also learn how to read maps and make simple maps. For our first science unit, we will be talking about force and motion. We will learn about 6 simple machines as well as things that affect how an object moves. We will also talk briefly about transfer of motion and gravity.

Reading We are starting a new reading program this year that I am very excited about. This year we will be focusing on informational and literature texts. We will be close reading which means that we will be spending time reading and rereading text to try to gain a deeper understanding of the story, This will include skills like main idea and details, comparing information in multiple texts, looking at the author's word choice, etc. Please work with your student at home on reading fluency as well as comprehension.

Writing This year we will cover 3 main types of writing: narrative, informational and persuasive. We will rotate constantly through these types of writing througout the year. We will also focus heavily on writing using evidence from a text. Each week, students will write based on the stories that we are reading. They will also work on various additional writing projects that involve imagination and often times research. The extra projects for the beginning of the year include interviewing and writing biographies about another person in the class and haunted house writing using colorful adjectives and verbs.