Hello!
March is almost here and I do not know about you, but I am ready for SPRING! It is hard to believe that it is already March.....where has the year gone?!?!
Your child's Term 1 report card and IEP will either have already been sent home, or be coming home soon. These reports are completed as a collaboration between myself and the homeschool. They are sent home from your child's homeschool. If you would like to discuss your child's progress at all, either on the phone or in person, I am happy to talk with you. I will send home an interview request form soon.
Some schools will be including the Term 2 IEP's in with the reports from Term 1. This means you will be receiving the grades and evaluations of their progress on their expectations from Term 1 as well as the new IEP goals that your child will be working toward in Term 2. Some schools will be sending the Term 2 expectations home at a later date.
Regardless of when you will be receiving the Term 2 document, I am happy to go over it with you as well. There is a lot of information in those documents and your voice as the parents is important. Your input on the IEP is encouraged!
The second term is underway and the students have been hard at work. We are working on new vocabulary words from different stories, listening comprehension skills, writing, different parts of speech, phonological awareness, decoding strategies, and punctuation.
We will begin our study of narratives very soon. We will be looking at the different parts of a story with specific focus on the 5 W’s (who, what where, when and why). You can reinforce this skill at home by reading with your children and asking them any one of these questions while reading. (Who is in this story? Why do you think they decided to do that? What is
happening now? What do you think will happen next?)
Throughout the year, the students have been learning about different strategies that will assist in their reading decoding and comprehension. Last term, we practiced making predictions and visualization. This term, we will focus on inferring. The basic idea of inferring is to figure out the things that the author does not outright say in a text.
The students have continued to work really hard on their writing. We have been working on sentence structure and how to write proper sentences. Sentences need to start with a capital letter, have all lower case letters in the middle, there needs to be finger spaces between the words and there should be punctuation at the end. We have been using our Writer's Eye to check and make sure our sentences are correct! We have started reading our written work out loud to see if we can hear the errors. It is a strategy that is really helpful for some kids. As we write, we want to get our ideas out on paper as quickly as we can so we don’t forget anything! This strategy provides a good opportunity to check to make sure it is in a logical order, has the proper punctuation and includes everything they had hoped! I am really proud of how each student has made gains in their writing!
This term, we will expand our writing and we will be starting to look at descriptive writing. Our goal for this style of writing is for the reader to be able to make a picture in their mind of the text. The students will learn to use their five senses and descriptive adjectives to write about people, places, things and events. This will be a fun and long writing unit!
We will also begin learning about Google Read and Write. It is an amazing tool that will help us with our reading and writing tasks. The Grade 3 students will first learn about the "read" function on the program which will highlight and read a text out loud! This is a fantastic way to eliminate frustration when text becomes too difficult. The idea is that the students are familiar and comfortable with this program in Grade 3 so that they can be better self-advocates in their learning in the junior grades. The students in Grade 1 and 2 have been exposed to the program in whole group activities. The focus for these students is more on logging into the computer and locating the programs. They will continue to use these programs in the coming years so that they feel comfortable and confident in using them throughout their learning.
We have now begun the season of Lent. Lent is the 40 days and nights leading up to Easter where we celebrate the death and resurrection of our Saviour. Lent is a time to show that we understand the sacrifices that have been made for us. We will be talking about how we can try to do nice and kind things, everyday, to bring us closer to God and Jesus during this sacred time.
As a class, we will be creating a book entitled “Our Lenten Promises”. Each student will write down something they would like to work toward during this sacred time. Ask your child what their Lenten Promise is.
Thanks for reading! As always, let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
Have a great week ☺
