Wow!  What a beautiful morning! 
I am thrilled to see the sun, to feel the warmth of its glow and to finally get outside without getting wet! It really feels as though we have turned a corner in the weather, and SPRING is here!!

I hope that everyone had a nice weekend enjoying the sun. Now.....time to work! 

As always, we have been quite busy here in the PLC.

In our writing, we are learning about describing. The students have been using their 5 senses to describe many different objects. Some of the students are working towards the goal of writing a descriptive text that includes a topic sentence, 3 details to describe the item, descriptive adjectives, and a concluding sentence. It is a lot of fun looking for ways to describe different things!

During our daily meetings and sharing circles, we incorporate many different Language Development skills. Identifying sounds, deleting sounds, blending sounds and rhyming words are part of our daily discussions. Feel free to try and incorporate these into your conversations at home!! 

We will continue to practice this writing form in large and small groups, and soon enough, the students will begin composing a descriptive text all on their own.

In our reading, we have been working hard and practicing our reading strategies every day! Since the students are at varying places in their reading journeys, students are working on different ways to solve unknown words. Here are the reading strategies that we have been learning about all year. Ask your child which one they use when they are reading and come to a word they do not know! 

  

Good readers use many different strategies to solve words. They also use different strategies to gain a better understanding of what they have read. We have been practicing predicting and inferring as comprehension strategies. Our goal and some success criteria for inferring as a tool to help us remember what we have to do! 

Another thing good readers do is ask questions! We have been working on our goal of using the 5 W's as a way to further understand stories we have read or listened to! 

We have used this chart to remind us of what each of the questions is about. We also talk about lesson was learned in the story. This has been a good way to practice retelling stories! Please feel free to ask your children about the 5 W's in a story when you are reading at home! 

Some other areas that we will begin working on shortly are: 

• comparing and contrasting objects. How are two things similar? How are they different? 
• synonyms, antonyms and multiple meaning words
• Media Literacy: identifying different massages within media 

A few reminders:

*Friday April 27th is a P.D. Day. Enjoy the long weekend!

* If your child is going to be absent, please remember to let transportation know. If you do not have your child's driver's phone number, just call STS at 613-723-9677 and they will let the drivers know. Thank you for support with this! 

*While the sun is out today, Spring days can still be wet! Please consider sending in extra clothing with your child just in case! We do have some extra clothes, but it always better to be safe than sorry.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about our hard work these past few weeks! We will continue to work on these skills.  A reminder that I will continue to post student videos, pictures and work through SeeSaw for you to see. Let me know if you need help accessing the app.