Today's Talking Points

Here are some things that we covered today that you can talk about with your child tonight:

• We are talking about making connections in literacy.  See if your child can name and explain these different types of connections that can be made with a book:
• Text to Self
• Text to Text
• Text to Person
• Text to History
• Text to World

• Making connections is an important way to know if your child is really engaged and understanding what he/she is reading.  It can be a great talking point and way to discuss books together.

• One of our literacy stories this week is called, My Great Aunt Arizona.  See if your child can tell you what connections he/she made with the story.

•  Today in writing I introduced the next writing project: creating a monster and writing a descriptive paragraph about the monster.  Today we read a book called, I Need My Monster to help get their imaginations going!

• In math we worked on knowing if a number is "greater than" or "less than" another number.  We are using the < and > or = signs to compare two numbers.      

• Another good concept to continue working on is counting money of different values.  For example counting up the total sum of 1 quarter, 2 dimes, 1 nickel and 3 pennies.  A strategy that I suggest is starting with the biggest coin/amount first and working down to the smallest coin/amount.  I notice that sometimes students struggling between "switching" back and forth with coins.  They can usually easily count by 10's or 5's, but often struggle when there are a variety of coins.