April

Here is a look at the skills we will be focusing on in April:

 

**Literacy**

We will begin on our next reading unit called, “Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons” by reviewing previously taught skills, along with focusing on: taking a sneak peek before reading a book, predicting, retelling a story, and rereading books to notice new details and patterns, learning about the characters and their relationships in the books, reading with fluency and expression, noticing lessons in books, using life lessons to better understand books, comparing and contrasting books, and giving book recommendations. For Writers Workshop, we will begin our “From Scenes to Series” writing unit, where the focus will be writing realistic fiction books. When writing a realistic fiction book, we will need to think of a pretend character, give the character a name, think of the setting, think of the trouble the character gets into, plan, sketch and write a realistic adventure for the character, along with including an ending, which will be getting the character out of trouble and including chapters for the beginning, middle, and ending.  Then we will write new adventures for the same character in new chapter books.  Also we will be using details, describing words, onomatopoeias, dialogue, and transition wordsIn addition, we will begin Unit 12 with learning about syllables in multisyllabic words, compound words, syllable division rules for closed syllables, and reading and spelling words with two closed syllables or closed and v-e syllables, along with paragraph structure.

    

**Math**

We will continue do the calendar as part of our daily routine, which includes the date, the days of the week, the months of the year, patterns, and counting the days using hundreds, tens, and ones.  Also we will identify and describe three-dimensional shapes according to their attributes, compose a new shape by combining three-dimensional shapes, use composite three-dimensional shapes to build new shapes, identify three-dimensional shapes used to build a composite shape using the strategy “act it out,” and identify two-dimensional shapes on three-dimensional shapes.         

 

**Science / Social Studies**

-Earth Day

-Arbor Day