Hello everyone!
First off…. a public service announcement! Please remember that your child should have a water bottle at school EVERY day. Many of our students do not have drinks included in their lunches, and when they do not have a water bottle either, they end up spending a good portion of our lunch period asking to go to the water fountain. This also happens during lessons – rather than grabbing a quick sip from a water bottle, the child has to leave the classroom for a drink… usually loitering in the hallway, examining bulletin boards, chatting with students from other classes, etc, before returning to class. We are having to get stricter about limiting the number of water excursions we can permit, simply because many of the students are missing out on too much learning time and too much eating time. Please help us (and your child!) by sending a LABELED water bottle with them to school each week. Thanks!!
Next, a quick request! We need your help! If anyone has any full-sized Pringle containers, paper towel rolls (specifically paper towel rather than toilet paper!), or 1 litre bottles, we would love to have them over the next couple of weeks! We are hoping to use them in Math Stations in some fun number activities. Thank you in advance!
Science:
Our class is full of bona fide Rainforest Explorers! We have continued learning lots of information about the forest floor and understory layers, and will continue learning about the canopy and emergent layers in the next couple of weeks. Ask your child… does the sun shine brightly on the forest floor? (Answer: no, because the thick tree branches in the canopy layer overhead block out a great deal of the light…) Also ask them what kind of creatures might be found in the rainforest… there are so many answers possible, I won’t even try to write them all down. ;P We have also began to practice our songs (one rainforest-specific, and all animal-centric) for our class performance in February! Please note, this performance was originally scheduled for February 4th, but due to some scheduling conflicts (the classroom teachers, Mrs. Floyd, and Ms. G all collaborate on our class performance!) we will be moving it to a date later in the month. That date will be confirmed in the next few days, and we will update you with that information shortly. Thanks for your understanding!
Literacy:
This week our sight word also tied into a phonics lesson, as we memorized how to spell “all” and learned that that single word unlocks a host of others… “fall,” “tall,” “ball,” and so on. In addition, we reviewed the letter “q,” accompanied of course by the ubiquitous “u.” We started a new read aloud as well, The Magic Tree House: Afternoon on the Amazon. This chapter book is a fun tie-in with our science studies!
Our literacy workstations are (as always!) differentiated to meet the needs of your individual student. Please note, when the item says “such-and-such OR such-and-such,” your child is only doing the one most suited to his/her development, not both. They include:
· Time with Ms. Louderback, practicing either phonics or comprehension skills
· Time with Mrs. K, practicing handwriting or (where further handwriting practice isn’t necessary) phonics or reading fluency
· A Write-the-Room (kind of like a scavenger hunt) either practicing sight words or practicing ending sentences with the correct punctuation (. ? !).
· Playing a matching game practicing reading Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words or arranging rainforest vocabulary in alphabetical order.
· Using letter stamps to practice identifying the final sound in C-V-C words or spelling out whole words.
· Checking out new books from the library
· Working on Writer’s Workshop pieces
· Listening to an audiobook, and completing a response page to reflect the child’s comprehension
· Labeling the anatomy of rainforest animals
· Creating a rainforest craft
· Playing iPad games to build phonics or comprehension skills
Math:
We sure were busy bees this week in Math! We focused on a range of topics including subtraction, shape and number formation. We started off the week reading Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons. Who knew it was such a class favorite!! We talked about different words for subtraction such as take away and subtract and all joined in with the story as Pete’s buttons were taken away!
We then moved onto shape and found out that although shapes can vary in size and position they still remain the same. A triangle can be big, small, or upside down, but it’s still a triangle! We re-introduced the trapezoid and the mathematical term for a diamond, a rhombus. We then sorted shapes by a range of attributes, including the type of shape, size and number of sides.
To round the week off we practiced our number formation. We listened to Mrs K hitting a tambourine and wrote the corresponding numbers in response. Lots of fun was had writing and erasing the numbers with dry-erase markers!
Our Math Stations this week include:
In other news:
We had a lot of fun with our Big Buddies this week, and participated in a valuable social justice exercise in honor of MLK day. Ask your child if something unfair happened to the Big Buddies, and how that made him/her feel… ask him what he/she could do if something like that ever happened to him/her or a classmate! Hopefully your student will have some really thoughtful answers to share with you. :)
Big thanks to Ella’s mom Hedy for being our Mystery Reader this week! Big thanks as well to Ana’s dad Alexander, who showed us some really awesome photos from his recent trip to Guinea. We were fascinated to see a glimpse into another culture, as well as seeing some of the bugs, lizards, and other creatures he encountered during his time there.
Have a wonderful long weekend! We look forward to seeing your students on Wednesday.
Here are some photos from math and literacy workstations this week. :) Be sure to check out our Shutterfly site for lots more!!
First off…. a public service announcement! Please remember that your child should have a water bottle at school EVERY day. Many of our students do not have drinks included in their lunches, and when they do not have a water bottle either, they end up spending a good portion of our lunch period asking to go to the water fountain. This also happens during lessons – rather than grabbing a quick sip from a water bottle, the child has to leave the classroom for a drink… usually loitering in the hallway, examining bulletin boards, chatting with students from other classes, etc, before returning to class. We are having to get stricter about limiting the number of water excursions we can permit, simply because many of the students are missing out on too much learning time and too much eating time. Please help us (and your child!) by sending a LABELED water bottle with them to school each week. Thanks!!
Next, a quick request! We need your help! If anyone has any full-sized Pringle containers, paper towel rolls (specifically paper towel rather than toilet paper!), or 1 litre bottles, we would love to have them over the next couple of weeks! We are hoping to use them in Math Stations in some fun number activities. Thank you in advance!
Science:
Our class is full of bona fide Rainforest Explorers! We have continued learning lots of information about the forest floor and understory layers, and will continue learning about the canopy and emergent layers in the next couple of weeks. Ask your child… does the sun shine brightly on the forest floor? (Answer: no, because the thick tree branches in the canopy layer overhead block out a great deal of the light…) Also ask them what kind of creatures might be found in the rainforest… there are so many answers possible, I won’t even try to write them all down. ;P We have also began to practice our songs (one rainforest-specific, and all animal-centric) for our class performance in February! Please note, this performance was originally scheduled for February 4th, but due to some scheduling conflicts (the classroom teachers, Mrs. Floyd, and Ms. G all collaborate on our class performance!) we will be moving it to a date later in the month. That date will be confirmed in the next few days, and we will update you with that information shortly. Thanks for your understanding!
Literacy:
This week our sight word also tied into a phonics lesson, as we memorized how to spell “all” and learned that that single word unlocks a host of others… “fall,” “tall,” “ball,” and so on. In addition, we reviewed the letter “q,” accompanied of course by the ubiquitous “u.” We started a new read aloud as well, The Magic Tree House: Afternoon on the Amazon. This chapter book is a fun tie-in with our science studies!
Our literacy workstations are (as always!) differentiated to meet the needs of your individual student. Please note, when the item says “such-and-such OR such-and-such,” your child is only doing the one most suited to his/her development, not both. They include:
· Time with Ms. Louderback, practicing either phonics or comprehension skills
· Time with Mrs. K, practicing handwriting or (where further handwriting practice isn’t necessary) phonics or reading fluency
· A Write-the-Room (kind of like a scavenger hunt) either practicing sight words or practicing ending sentences with the correct punctuation (. ? !).
· Playing a matching game practicing reading Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words or arranging rainforest vocabulary in alphabetical order.
· Using letter stamps to practice identifying the final sound in C-V-C words or spelling out whole words.
· Checking out new books from the library
· Working on Writer’s Workshop pieces
· Listening to an audiobook, and completing a response page to reflect the child’s comprehension
· Labeling the anatomy of rainforest animals
· Creating a rainforest craft
· Playing iPad games to build phonics or comprehension skills
Math:
We sure were busy bees this week in Math! We focused on a range of topics including subtraction, shape and number formation. We started off the week reading Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons. Who knew it was such a class favorite!! We talked about different words for subtraction such as take away and subtract and all joined in with the story as Pete’s buttons were taken away!
We then moved onto shape and found out that although shapes can vary in size and position they still remain the same. A triangle can be big, small, or upside down, but it’s still a triangle! We re-introduced the trapezoid and the mathematical term for a diamond, a rhombus. We then sorted shapes by a range of attributes, including the type of shape, size and number of sides.
To round the week off we practiced our number formation. We listened to Mrs K hitting a tambourine and wrote the corresponding numbers in response. Lots of fun was had writing and erasing the numbers with dry-erase markers!
Our Math Stations this week include:
- Looking at different ways to represent numbers with Mrs K, including a review of tallying
- The Ladybug game - where you match the dots on the dice to the dots on the cards and then turn the cards over to see how many ladybugs you have (the one with the most ladybugs wins)
- Racing penguins - where you roll a die and move penguin pegs across a number line (first one to 20 wins)
- Geoboards and rubber bands for making shapes and in some cases shape pictures
- ipads - this week we focused on using a shape app to reinforce our learning
- Building towers with 20 cups
- Number formation in trays of sand
- Pete the cat subtraction game - where you have buttons on your shirt board and roll a die to see how many you need to take away (first one to take away all their buttons wins)
In other news:
We had a lot of fun with our Big Buddies this week, and participated in a valuable social justice exercise in honor of MLK day. Ask your child if something unfair happened to the Big Buddies, and how that made him/her feel… ask him what he/she could do if something like that ever happened to him/her or a classmate! Hopefully your student will have some really thoughtful answers to share with you. :)
Big thanks to Ella’s mom Hedy for being our Mystery Reader this week! Big thanks as well to Ana’s dad Alexander, who showed us some really awesome photos from his recent trip to Guinea. We were fascinated to see a glimpse into another culture, as well as seeing some of the bugs, lizards, and other creatures he encountered during his time there.
Have a wonderful long weekend! We look forward to seeing your students on Wednesday.
Here are some photos from math and literacy workstations this week. :) Be sure to check out our Shutterfly site for lots more!!