February 1, 2010
(Sorry this wasn’t published until now! It was saved as a draft instead of being published)
Happy February!!
We are now into the second half of the school year! Time sure flies!!
There will be a Family Literacy Night at RMDS on Wednesday, February 10th. The theme will be Winter Olympics. We hope to see you there. Also, there will be a book fair during this time.
We had a honor roll ceremony last Friday. Congratulations to our students who got on the honor roll.
We hope to see more students on the honor roll. The key to get on the honor roll is to participate, be ready for classes and complete their homework on time.
Here are tidbits from what is happening in our classes:
Mary’s classroom
Reading and Writing-We are very close completing our book reading. The students continued to work on answering reading comprehension questions and writing down their feelings/thoughts of each chapter of their book. The students are practicing with interference and prediction skills with different short stories. Winter theme essay is our current writing project. Some of the students are writing descriptive essay about their favorite winter sport. Other students are writing narrative stories. The students are still practicing writing topic sentences and paragraphs.
Math-The students are still working with Singapore Math strategy using word problems. Some students learned number theories with fractions such as divisibility, simplify fractions, equivalent fractions, addition and subtraction with fractions while other group of students started to learn number theories with factions.
U.S. History-The students just completed their history review test last week. The test covered what they have learned since beginning of August. We emphasized our studies on the tensions between the colonists and the British. The objective was to comprehend what events caused the start of the American Revolutionary War. Currently, we are learning about the strength and weakness of the British and Continental Armies. We will learn about the Constitution and Bill of Rights next week.
U.S. Geography- The students completed their studies on Southeast Regions. They created books or brochures on different states. Currently, we are focusing on Midwest Region. The students learned variety of geography vocabulary terms as we study each region.
Sara Lee’s corner:
ASL: We are focusing on presentation skills and how we can organize our thoughts and present them in ASL. We are participating in the ASL essay contest at Gallaudet University. Also for Deaf Studies, we are starting a biography project on Deaf People.
Reading: We focused on how to write great short answers by paraphrasing the questions. This is a great preparation for the CSAPS. We are starting new books and working on the setting. On Fridays, we work on specific skills involving reading comprehension and how to read charts in preparation for CSAPs, too.
Writing: We practiced writing great topic sentences for a variety of topics. Also, we are working on creating a multi-paragraph essay on the same topic as ASL essay contest. We are working on how to organize and expand the paragraph with examples or details.
The topic for both writing and ASL essay contest at Gallaudet University is as follows:
Helping Others: How I Can Make a Difference in My Community?
Sara Lee, Mary & Jeff
