1. Important Information
Title 1 Reading
3rd Nine Weeks
Mrs. Linden
March 15, 2016
Kindergarten:
I am so proud of the Kindergarten students! So many students have already mastered all of their letters. We are continuing to follow the Orton-Gillingham sequence for learning letters and sounds. We have learned c, o, a, d, g, m, l, h, t, i, j, k, p, u, b, r, f, n, and e. We also started learning about digraphs. We started this concept by learning about ch. We learned that in a digraph the letters come together to make a new sound. We will learn more digraphs next quarter.
The students have learned 43 sight words already. They are doing a great job reading these tricky rule breakers. I will be sending home a rapid word chart for each student. They need to read these words every night to help them master sight words. We have eleven more to learn.
2nd Grade:
The second graders spent most of the quarter working on vowel digraphs. A vowel digraph occurs when there are two vowels together that make one sound. We learned that there are many ways to make a long a sound, e sound, and o sound. Sometimes there are tricks that we can use to help us spell the word correctly. For example, if we hear a long o sound at the end of the word we would use oe, but if we hear it in the middle of a word we use oa. This can be tricky, especially when it comes to homophones (words that sound the same, but have different meanings).
We also spent some time working with collective nouns. We practiced matching collective nouns to the noun that they represent.
The students are continuing with their repeated readings. Thank you for helping them read these passages at home.
Important Information
Thank you to all of the parents who attended our Spring Parent Meeting. I hope you are able to use those materials to help promote reading at home. These are great activities to use over the summer.
Attached to this newsletter is a parent survey. Please, complete this and send it in with your child. This survey is very important to us. We use it to help with future planning of the Title 1 program.
Title 1 folders will continue coming home on Mondays throughout the end of the school year. The majority of the homework for March and April will be based on our One Book, One School project book, which is The World According to Humphrey.

2. Fourth Grade:
Third Grade:
The third graders spent a lot of time working on vocabulary this quarter. We learned that if we do not know the meaning of a word, we can look for clues in the text. We practiced searching through the text to find these clues and then we would highlight them. This helped us develop our own definition for the word.
Many of these vocabulary words that we were reading were multisyllabic. These words are tricky for the students to read because they need to learn how to divide these words into syllables. After we decided where to divide syllables, then we labeled each syllable as open, closed, magic e or vowel team. If the students know the rules for the syllables, then they will know how to pronounce the word. This is a tricky concept, but they did wonderful with this. By using this strategy, they were able to read the word “Constantinople”. They were really impressed with themselves after reading this word. We will focus on r controlled syllables and consonant le syllables next quarter.
We also continued reading different texts to find information. It is so important for them to use the text to answer questions. We always highlight our evidence to prove that our answers are right.
Repeated readings will conclude in April. Thank you for reading these passages with your child.
The fourth graders are working on a book study. The name of the book is Balto and the Great Race. We started reading this book right before the current Iditarod race started in Alaska. Before reading, we did some research on the Iditarod to build up our background knowledge of this topic. The students did a wonderful job locating important events about the race using electronic sources. They also had to include multimedia visuals, like pictures and videos. Periodically, we have continued to check the progress of the race.
We are working on many different reading skills while reading Balto and the Great Race. We have spent a lot of time working on vocabulary, especially using information in the text to help us figure out the meaning of the words. We also started working with figurative language. The author used many examples of similes and metaphors. We learned what the difference is between the two and how to explain what they mean. We will finish the book next quarter.
We continued our work with a new set of Greek and Latin Roots. This quarter we worked with aud, photo, therm, struct, and vis. It is important to know the meanings of these roots because it helps the students understand the meaning of words. This skill also helps them chunk words together when reading words.
Contact Information:
Towslee Elementary
(330)