We continued to practice identifying the digraphs ch, sh, th, wh, and ck and reading and spelling words that contained these blends. Your child should have brought home a decodable passage that we worked on in class that they can practice reading with you.

We have also been working a lot with word families. We are learning that if you know how to spell a word like cat, you can easily spell many other words that rhyme - sat, hat, mat, chat...

In Math, we continued to practice our doubles facts on a daily basis and played two games to reinforce this skill. We are also beginning our unit on Shapes. At this point, it is mainly a review of 2D shapes but we will be venturing into 3D shapes shortly. On Friday, we did an art activity with shapes with our Grade 4 Buddies.

In Social Studies, we talked about Constructed Landmarks/Features and discussed what makes them different from Natural Landmarks/Features which we learned about last week. Next week, I may take the students on a community walk (weather dependent) to find natural and constructed features in our community.

In Science, we have started to learn about the Properties of Matter. We are learning vocabulary to describe objects, such as colour words, size words, texture words, and weight words. Your child should have brought home a pink note explaining a learning task we will do next Monday (January 19) to further practice using this vocabulary. If the note did not make it home, your child needs to bring in a toy no larger than the size of an adult hand that they will have to draw and describe in their journal. I would suggest putting the toy in a bag and labelling it with your child's name. Then toy will be sent home at the end of the day.

A friendly reminder to please send library books back by Tuesday morning each week as we have our book exchange that day.