**What a week it has been! Our Halloween Parade, Party and Assembly was great. We had a beautiful day for a parade. Lots of very cute and cool costumes. I have pictures taken by Lindsay's dad that I will post soon. Mei-Li, Tyler, Ava, Isabel and Ben are featured on the main District 97 website. Hats of to Room 110 at Irving!
**Yaya and Alex, our Student Council reps have a flyer included in this weeks homework packet for "Hats Off for Cancer" raising money for cancer research. Hope to see dollars and hats on Tuesday.
**NO SCHOOL on Friday, November 11th in observance of Veteran's Day.
**Don't forget to send in a picture of your child's baby picture for our SEASONAL BABIES project on Monday, November 7th.
**Permission slip and info for our field trip to Brookfield Zoo is enclosed in the homework packet. Please send money and slip back ASAP.
**Picture Retake Day is Wednesday, November 16th. You will be receiving more info on this from the office.
**The students participated in an informative presentation by Ms. Allen of the Multicultural Center on Dia de los Muertos, a Mexican celebration that honors the dead. Ms. Allen used pictures and artifacts in her presentation. Ask your child about the use of skeletons, sugar artifacts and special bread or pan.
**The students had a COOL TOOLS Assembly on Friday, November 4th to review procedures and appropriate behavior in the bathrooms and on the playground.
**Route to Reading Rotation 3 has begun. If you have any questions about your child and the skill level he/she is working on, please contact the teacher at the bottom of the notification sheet.
**Here's a shout out for old magazines. We use them to find pictures and for collage activities. Send them in when you can. Thanks!
**Mr. Packer's Math focused on a new unit on Probability. Mr. Packer and I continue to use rotating small groups on Thursdays. All students work in both groups.
** Ms. Bell Bey and Ms. Kwiatts Friendship Club lesson centered around the appropriate behavior on the playground. Role playing and skits helped reinforced the concepts.
**We have completed Unit 2 Friends in our Treasures series and will take our unit assessment on Monday.
**The students have begun exploring the IPAD as a tool to enhance their learning. See the new heading below that will describe our weekly activities and usage.
This week:
It was all about BEARS and IPADS, but we will save IPADS for the tech section. We began with an initial discussion/dictation on what students knew about Bears. We looked at some characteristics that all bears have and talked specifically about brown bears. We gathered some information online from the North American Bear Center. The students learned about where brown bears are found, how they live, distinguishing characteristics, habitats and how they are mammals like us. The students were wowed by the fact that bears become adults when they are 2 years old and that female bears are excellent mothers. During station day activities the students created a sponge painted bear for our writing assignment, built a pattern block bear and sorted, counted and added bears in an activity. We read and shared many fiction and nonfiction books about the brown bear. The bear nature table will be up and running next week. Stay tuned!
Reading/Social Studies: The students completed Unit 2 Friends in our Treasures Reading Series. This week centered around friends who solve problems together. The students listened to the story, "Simon and Molly plus Hester." They asked and answered questions and responded to the literature by making connections in their own lives. The students reviewed sight words a and like, wrote them and used them in a written sentence. They reviewed the sounds of Pp and Ss and what a noun is. The students retold the story using the retelling cards. In phonemic awareness activities, the students categorized and blended phonemes to make 3 letter words. The students read the pre-decodable, "I Like, We Like." The students made predictions about what the story was about and practiced their reading with a partner. We used the oral vocabulary cards to develop our robust vocabulary in the tale from Haiti called, "The Turtle and the Sheep." Our Robust Vocabulary words this week were PROBLEM, SOLVE, GRATEFUL, THOUGHTFUL and INCLUDE. Our reading puppet, Mr. Happy helped us blend more 3 letter words. We used our dry erase boards to record the initial sound we heard in a word. In our read aloud folktale. "The Little red Hen," the students listened to fluent reading, recurring phrases and discussed what the lesson was at the end of the story. The students sequenced the events in the story. The students read their pre-decodable, "We Like" and "Pam" and practiced reading for fluency. We continued to review asking questions, sight words, nouns, colors and initial sounds-Pp, Ss, Mm and Aa. Workstations activities this week included creating sounds files with A, S, T, P and M pictures, creating a sentence or sentences about what two friends might say to each other and putting it in a speech bubble, expressing your feelings by drawing yourself happy and sad and writing a sentence about both and reading and responding to a book you read and sharing it with a friend.
Math: This week the focus was on the concept of time. The students had a lively discussion about the present, past and future and what happened today and yesterday or tomorrow, what is a short time and what is a long time. We took a look at the both digital and analogue clocks. We looked at numbers, hands and talked about minutes, hours and seconds. The students participated in an activity where they marked time using a drum beat, second hand, stop watch. What does five minutes feel like? Is ten minutes a long time? We observed the movement of the various hands on an analogue clock. We continue to work with patterns and shapes and are noticing more common attributes. We continue counting our way to 100 and think about place value. In our Problem of the Day activities, the students explored the concept tallest and problem solving by using math vocabulary in all, all together. We continue to explore the concepts greater than and less then.
Writing: The students continued work on letters U and V and added W. The students continue to work on proper posture and strengthening pencil grasp. They are now working toward where to put upper and lower case letters on a given line. Next week, we will have new lined journals! The students continue to use writing prompts from our reading series. Many students are beginning to use more then their sight vocabulary in their sentences. The students do continue to use their inventive spelling. They are also using more labeling and speech bubbles to get their point across in their writing.
Technology: The students have begun using the IPADS in work stations, for small group work and for choice time. Ms. Applebey, our skilled IPAD tech will be working with us the next few weeks to help with technique and lesson choice. She is fabulous! In our work stations this week, students used the app Word Wizard to work with word families, creating real and nonsense words and then composing sentences. Students also used the app My ABC's to explore ordering the alphabet, locating upper and lower case letters, finding the pictures and corresponding letter sound and matching words. In Math, students used the app Monster Squeeze with a partner using numbers 5-15, 10-20 and 20-30. Students also used the app Intro to Numbers in small group to sequence order, locate the missing number, count and listen and recreate the musical pattern. The students also explored recoding themselves reading a story and playing it back to hear. Tons of fun and learning!
Literature: "Good Boy, Fergus," "Hispanic Holidays," "The Pumpkin Circle," "Zero is the Leaves on the Tree," "Skippy John Jones in Mummy Trouble," "T-Rex Trick or Treats," "Amazing Bears," "Time to Sleep," "Brown Bears," "If Bear Can, I Can," "A Birthday for Bear," "There's No Such Thing As Monsters."
