**We have a good, productive week. The students are enjoying our water experiments and the anticipation of more snow!
**Route to Reading Rotation 5 will begin on Monday, January 23rd. Your child will receive notification of the current skill being worked on.
**I am continuing to administer assessments in preparation for our Parent/Teacher Conferences. If you have not done so already, please confirm your day and time. If you cannot make the time, no problem, email me for a new time.
**Mid Year Conferences for my class will be held Tuesday, January 31st, Wednesday, February 1st and Thursday, February 2nd. Please Note: School will only be in session the morning of Thursday, February 2nd and Friday, February 3rd. Dismissal will be at 11:00 am. No afternoon session or lunch. Hephzibah and River Forest Community Center pickup is at 11:00 am.
**Reading Grandma Mary (Monday afternoon) and Ms. Amanda (Wednesday morning) will begin assisting next week. We are excited!
**The 100th Day/Valentine's Day Celebration is set for Friday, February 10th from 1-2:55 pm. S. Walker, M. Chlebek, M. Meagher, C. Bravo, T. Naber, G. Quiones-Garcia and J. Andersson have signed up to help. We also have Lottie's grandma coming too! We could use a few more volunteers. Email me if interested. The student's 100th Day project will be sent home on Thursday along with instructions.
**We enjoyed snacks and stories with our Book Buddies for our January meeting. Next month, we will go up to their classroom!
**We are getting ready to ring in the Chinese New Year next week. It is the Year of the Dragon! Mei-Li's mom will give a presentation on their family tradition and history. Ms. Applebey will help facilitate a cool technology project using Tangrams and the IPAD. Stay tuned!
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Kwiatt revisited the concept of self control. The students brainstormed ideas to help get them through situations that become frustrating.
**Mr. Packer continued his lesson on graphing outcomes and the terms probably, always and never. He started reading a really cool book called, "Tomorrow's Alphabet."
**Keep sending your child dressed for the weather. Unless it is super cold, we will go out each day. Snow pants, gloves, hats, scarves and boots are a must! Don't forget to send gym shoes on gym days. (Tuesdays and Fridays) Thanks!
**A Continued Giant Boxes and Cool Things shout out for our future space station project in April. Keep saving them. I will have you bring them in after spring break.
**Spelling City has been updated. Remember, you can always access a prior list to review!
This week:
It continues to be all about Weather and Water. Once again on Friday, the students tracked the latest snowstorm using the Weatherunderground site. The students also tracked where the storm came from and where it was headed. The students also observed what area would get the greatest amount of snow or rain. Pretty cool! In science, the students continued to marvel at the "climbing water" experiment with celery in red water. On the return to school on Monday, the celery was all red!!! Many objects and foods have tiny spaces for water to climb into. Even our skin has tiny spaces! Ask your child about it. The students experimented with water tornadoes and continues to explore water table activities. Station Day activities this week included, creating a lantern style snowman, making a sound blending wheel for the OCK word family and using the extension activities and using pictures to tell what happens to the snowman and writing a sentence under each picture. We are changing our Friendship Tree into a Mitten Tree. We read a story about a grandma who knits mittens for children who do not have any and hangs them on a spruce tree. What do the children do in return?
Reading/Social Studies: The students continue to work in Unit 5 Animals in our Treasures Reading series. This week the student's built background knowledge surrounding how an animal changes and grows. They listened to the Big Book story, "Animal Babies ABC." We reviewed the word, expository--a story that give information about a subject. The students made connections about animals they had seen from the story and where they had seen them. They made comparisons on how some animals perhaps live in the same areas or eat different foods. The sight word for this week was play. The students reviewed the word and all others previously taught using the "Hands Up, Hands Down" game. Using our sound spelling workboard, the students took a spelling test to see how many of the words they could spell. Great work! Our target sound for the week was letter Ff. We read a rhyme and chant containing letter Ff words. The students took turns coming up to the rhyme and circling all the letter Ff's they saw. They continued to review nouns and verbs and wrote sentences in their journals with an animal name and action. The students used the retelling cards to help retell the story in their own words. Robust Vocabulary for this week included the words, FRAGILE, BELONG, SEVERAL, PARENT and INFORMATION. Our puppet, Mr. Happy helped the students model blending sounds to form a word. They used the elkonin boxes to sound blend words using short O, A and I vowels and consonants. We are working on 3-4-5 phoneme words. The students read their decodable story, "Can It Fit?" and made predictions about story content. They practiced reading their story to a partner and received feedback on how they read using the reader's checklist. The students listened to the fairytale, 'The Ugly Duckling." They reflected on the differences between the the gray duckling and the others. They commented on what the mother told the gray duckling. They talked about the change at the end of the story. The students enjoyed two poems about animals and discussed which one they liked better and why. All students read the paper story, "We Play" for fluency building. The students listened to the tale of the "Three Bears." Many of the children commented that they had heard the story many times. The students thought and responded about--What would have happened if the bears came home early? Why do you think the author wrote this story? The students recorded some of their ideas in their journals. Workstation activities this week included animal sort where the students graphed animals according to categories pets-wild-farm. They then wrote a sentence about one of their animals, What can you and your animal do? Writing an I can/They can sentence and illustrating it, read it and add to it where a student shares a story with a partner and then writes and illustrates a different ending and an IPAD activity emphasizing word building with short o and writing down words that were made.
Math: The students continued to study time by the hour and review clocks parts. We discussed the concept of counting by 5's as you move from number to number on an analog clock. We used our clocks to practice counting by 5's to 60. Some students are beginning to get the idea. We continue to work with counting to 100, counting to 100 by tens, and counting back from 15-0, as well as graphing opportunities with Mr. Packer. This week, we explored the world of scales and weights and measures. We practiced "weighing" objects and seeing how many bears or cubes it took to balance the scale. We took a look at the parts of the scale. The students were busy adding quantities together. Some students used the IPAD to illustrate a given problem.
Writing: The students have begun work on "Magic C" lowercase letters, c,o and a. We used our practice boards and paper to work on formation. The students worked in their orange books. They continue to use the writing prompts from our Treasures series. The students are writing 2 sentences. We continue to stress use of an uppercase letter to begin a sentence, an ending mark, spacing between words in a sentence, beginning at the left and placement of letters on a given line. In order for it to be a sentence, it has to name and tell.
Science: The students recorded what they observed with their celery in red water. We took sample pieces of a plain piece of celery and the piece that had turned red. We placed them under the microscope. WOW! Lots of spaces observed in both, but the red celery had much more defined spaces. The students moved on to Experiment 4--The Shape of Water. As the students took turns pouring water from one container to another, they discovered that water does not have its own shape, it takes the shape of whatever container it is in. The students extended this activity to think about the shapes of bodies of water and what the shape reminded them of----Lake Michigan, The Mississippi River, The Atlantic Ocean. Cool thinking! In Experiment 5, the students observed how various objects behave in water and predicted whether they will sink or float. I used some big words--displacement (pushing away), density (measure of mass.) The students did their experiment with members of their table. They observed the results and recorded them. They then got to go other tables to see other table results. Not all tables had the same results. Two tables had rubber bands sink--two tables had rubber bands that floated. Why? Much discussion took place. Stay tuned. Next week--what is a bubble?
Technology: In reading, the students used the app Montessori Crossword with the option of using short o words to sound out. They looked at the picture, found the letters to spell the word and wrote it down. The app Sound Sort was used by small groups to review beginning letter sounds. In handwriting, students got an opportunity to work with the app Whiteboard to practice their 'Magic C" lowercase letters. In math, small group work centered on the app Math Bug (addition and subtraction,) the app Labyrinth (problem solving) and the app Underwater Memory Match (visual motor and memory) and the app Doodle Buddy was used to illustrate story problems.
Literature: "Ice," "Six Snowy Sheep." "Curious George Snowy Day," "Snowman at Night," "Sink or Swim," "Water," "The Mitten," version 3 by S. Oliver, "Blizzards," "Some things Float," "Duck for President," "The Mitten Tree," "All You Need to Make a Snowman."
