**I hope everyone had a restful Columbus Day weekend. I know the weather was beautiful. I hope everyone got a chance to be outside. I traveled to Florida to visit friends. We had the exact same weather!! I got to ride a horse!
**Picture Day was successful! The students looked great and had wonderful smiles. Thanks to Ms. Walker and Ms. Garcia for lending a helping hand.
**All students participated in Walk to School Day. Students who did not have a chance to walk to school walked at lunchtime with our own, Ms. Hiolski. All students received a hand stamp and colored a shoe. Mr. Hancock will decorate the gym with them.
**Don't forget to send back your Parent Conference response form. I am looking forward to meeting with you to share your child's progress on 10/18-19 and 20.
**PLEASE NOTE that school is in session ONLY in the MORNING on Thursday, October 20th and Friday, October 21st. Dismissal is at 11:00 am. Hephzibah and RFCC students will be pick up as usual.
**Route to Reading Rotation 2 will begin Tuesday, October 11th. You have received notification as to what skill group your child will be working in. If you did not receive this information, please contact me.
**Our Parent Helper STATION DAY will begin on Friday, October 14th. Ms. Mikos and Ms. Garcia will be facilitating the table stations this week. Check my blog at the left side and click on station day helpers to see when you are scheduled. I will also send a hard copy.
**CONGRATULATIONS to our Student Council reps for this trimester. They are ALEX and YAYA. Their first meeting is Tuesday, October 18th.
**We have received 93 Eagle Wings!!!!(PBIS behavior incentive) This qualifies our class for a special event. The students have chosen to have a PAJAMA/CD STORY BOOK DISCUSSION on Thursday, October 20th from 10:00-11:00 am. It is well deserved. I will send more info on this next week.
**October Book order is enclosed with the homework packet. Book orders are due either on line or with form and money on October 19th.
**In Friendship Club, Ms Kwiatt continued her discussion on likes and dislikes in the We Are the Same, We are Different Unit and the students worked on a variety of activities.
**I am finishing up all Fall Assessments in preparation for Conferences.
This week:
It continues to be about APPLES. We explored more types of apples and how they are alike and different. The students created apple print trees, made apple patterns with stickers, printed with the core star, did apple math by counting apples and read many stories both fiction and non fiction about apples. Next week, we will create an Apple Book, cook up some apple delight and taste test more types of apples.
Reading: We continue on in Unit 1, Families in our Treasures series. Our phonics portion had the students working on the Letter and sound of Aa in short and long form. The students worked on learning about naming words. We brainstormed a list and learned the formal word NOUN. We discussed nouns that name people, places, animals and things. The students generated lists of each. In our Robust Vocabulary study, the students added ACTIVITY and COOPERATE to their vocabulary list. Ask your child about those words. The students worked on listening comprehension using the big book story, "The Picnic at Apple Park." They identified where the story takes place (setting) and made predictions about the what would happen next. We discussed how the story structure can help provide evidence for our predictions. The students responded and retold events in the story in sequence. We worked on concept words--same and different. We began the process of phoneme blending or orally putting sounds together to form a word. We used A and M. Our dog puppet, Mr. Happy helped us do this. He is way more fun then Ms. Gullo when he sounds things out! We added the Robust Vocabulary words EXCITING, EXHAUSTED and GATHER to our list. Ask your child about these words. The students worked on their sight vocabulary words--I, We, Can, Am, The. We played "Hands Up, Hands Down," and did a word sort. Our listening and thinking story this week was the folktale, "The Squeaky Old Bed." The students retold the story and discussed the words that were recurring. What was their favorite part? They illustrated and wrote about it. Did the story teach you something? What? We finished the week reading all of our pre decodable books as shared reading and partner reads. The students had a great fun during their workstation time. Their stations included creating sentences from their sight words and pictures, reading a story and adding a new page to the end of it (what could happen next?), writing sentences about themselves and reading it to a partner and interviewing a partner and drawing what his or her family likes to do. We received our Activity Books and the students caught up by working on pages they had missed.
Math: We are counting everything in sight! How high can we go? 20? 30? 50? 100? The students worked on place value using straws in groups of ten. They also learned the term DIGIT. Is 32 a 2 digit or 1 digit number? We learned to play "Monster Squeeze," using the concepts greater than and less than to find a mystery number. We reviewed our pattern block shapes and learned to count pennies and use the cents sign and read amounts. We are matching the number with the quantity in our domino game. The students continue to work with their numbers cards 0-15 to recognize, sequence, find the missing and count one more or one less.
Writing: We continue to work on adding more details to our drawings and having our drawings reflect the words we use to describe them. The students continue to use writing prompts from our reading series. We continue to work on forming a sentence (naming and telling.) We are learning to track and space between words in a sentence and begin with a capital letter. This week, we finished up our Frog Jump letters N and M. We will review all Frog Jump letters.
Literature: "Apple Countdown," "I Am a Leaf." "The Best Class Picture Ever," "The Big Apple Mystery," " A was Once an Apple Pie," "Apples, Apples Everywhere," "Apples and Pumpkins," "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves."
