**It was a busy and productive week! The students continue to respond to our Eagle Essentials Guidelines and are beginning to be very much a part of shaping their own behavior. The students continue to work on fostering positive peer relationships both in and out of our classroom.
**PICTURE DAY is Tuesday, October 2nd. Our class will have their picture taken at 8:30 am. If the weather is agreeable, we will have our class picture taken outside. Volunteers, M.Schwager and L. Pointer will lend a hand and perhaps a comb!
**WALK to SCHOOL DAY is Wednesday, October 3rd. Everyone who walks to school that day will receive a cool shoe to color and hand stamp. Mr. Hancock will display all the shoes in the gym. If your child is unable to walk that day, Mr. Hancock will lead a walk around the school grounds at lunch time and students will receive their shoe to color and stamp.
**Congratulations to AMARE and IVY--our GREEN TEAM REPS for this year! They will attend bi monthly meetings and keep our class up to date with ideas and projects that make our school GREENER! This year the focus will be on recycling in the lunchroom. Their first meeting is Tuesday during lunch recess.
**Don't forget to sign your child up for the RUN FUN FUNDRAISER. Our class will be running/walking on Tuesday October 16th at 8:30 am. We have 4 students signed up with pledges. Let's have some more!!!
**NO SCHOOL--Monday, October 8th in observance of Columbus Day.
**Formal letters and reminders for Parent/Teacher Conferences will go out on Tuesday. Check your child's backpack. Parent/Teacher Conferences will be held Tuesday, October 16th, Wednesday, October 17th, Thursday, October 18th and Friday, October 19th. Please Note: Thursday and Friday, October 18th and 19th, school is in session in the morning only. Dismissal is at 11:00 am. There is no afternoon session.
**Route to Reading Rotation 1 will begin on Tuesday, October 2nd. Your child will be bringing home information on the skill they will be working on and the teacher who is teaching it. Route to Reading Skill Specific Groups meet 3 times a week for 40 minutes.
**The students brought home some information about Student Council. Each class will choose 2 students to represent their class. Check out the criteria. Your child can sign up if interested. We will choose our reps on Thursday.
**Thanks for sending back the MILLION MINUTES SHEETS! B. Howell will begin the recording next weekend. The next sheet is in your child's backpack. READ! READ! READ!
**SEASONAL BABIES PROJECT--Please send a baby picture of your child to school for our project. The photo will be displayed all year and it will be returned to you at the end of the school year. We will do the project on October 15th.
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey continued her lesson and activities on Tattling vs. Reporting.
**In Mr. Packer Math this week, Mr. Packer did a group activity where he read a cool story about present and future and challenged the students to see if they could predict what would happen. Great higher level thinking skills involved!
**FINAL CALL for Parent Volunteers for Friday Station Day. I am in the process of creating a rotating list of helpers. I will post it on my blog as well as send a hard copy. Our first station day is Friday, October 12th.
This week:
It was all about the new season of Fall and changes that are already beginning to occur. Also, APPLE MANIA has hit our classroom! We have begun our APPLE cross curricular theme. The students participated in a initial inquiry to determine what they knew about apples. They had great fun using their magnifiers and microscope to observe the flower, seeds, flesh, skin and core. We learned what a blossom was. The apples were cut on their sides to reveal the flower or the star. We have begun to read informational (non fiction) books on the subject. More next week. We are integrating our study of Apples into our math, reading, science, art and writing activities. Stay tuned!! Our station day activities this week included hidden picture color (reading color words,) creating and naming a pattern using apple stickers, "pinky" painting seeds on your apple. (Each apple had a number on it.)
Reading/Social Studies: We have begun UNIT 1 FAMILIES in our Treasures Reading Series. The students built background knowledge on types of families they knew about. We discussed animal families and human families. We all shared experiences about our families. The students listened to a Big Book story called, "Whose Baby Am I?" The students made predictions about story content and observed patterns in the text. They examined the cover, title page, front and back parts and page numbers. We reviewed our previous sight words and added the new words WE and THE. We spelled and wrote them and used them in our journal. Our target sound in isolation this week was the letter Mm. The students worked on additional vocabulary this week while listening to the fable, "The Lioness and the Ostrich." This vocabulary is referred to as ROBUST VOCABULARY. Ask your child about the words ANIMAL, PROTECT, TOGETHER and RESEMBLE. We defined each word and gave an example sentence. We used them frequently in our discussions. The students worked on story words CUB, JOEY and PUP in the baby animal world. We read aloud our pre-decodable story, "I Can, We Can." The students continue to work on tracking words and pictures in a sentence using their famous pointing finger. The students worked on responding and retelling parts of our read aloud story, "The Bundle of Sticks." We read our other pre-decodable story, "We Can" and focused on our sight words and comprehension. The students continue their work on nouns. They brainstormed lists of people, places and animals. The students enjoyed their workstations this week. While I worked with small groups, the students also worked in rotating small groups creating an Mm mural looking for and cutting out Mm pictures and labeling them, playing an uppercase/lowercase match game with Ms. Dennis, creating a family sizes graph using paper dolls and sharing a story with a partner and retelling it. Our table managers are beginning to take more responsibility setting up, controlling noise and helping to resolve conflicts in the table group. There were also several opportunities for movement.
Math: The students continue work on PENNY POWER. They reviewed how much a penny is worth and had fun playing "Heads or Tails Tally," "Penny Grab," and "Spin a Number" in English and in Spanish. They continue to work on reinforcing number recognition 0-20 and counting quantities. The students reviewed analogue and digital clock parts and understanding time by the hour. We played the digit game---How many digits does the number 5 have? 26? 124? We worked on the concepts first, middle, last, same and different and greater than/less than. The students used their number cards to count in sequence, match numbers with a partner and tell which number is bigger. The students continue to work on forming simple and more complex patterns using stickers, cubes, pattern blocks and bears.
Writing: The students continue to work on using their writing prompts from our Treasures series. We continue to reinforce our Frog Jump Letters--F, E, D, P. The students are using their mini boards with mini chalk and sponges. They are also working on beginning sentence structure---Name----Tell about it. Subject---Action. Do their drawings describe their picture? Students are at a variety of levels---recording beginning letter for a word that describes their picture, recording one word including beginning and ending sound, writing a sentence that includes inventive spelling for their subject and action and recording short three word sentences.
Technology: The students used a variety of activities on the iPad to reinforce their curriculum. In reading, the students continue to use the apps My ABC and ABC Touch which contain activities on ordering abc's, patterns, finding letters and matching letters and their initial sound. The app Montessori Crossword was used to assist students in listening for letter sounds and dragging them in the correct sequence to form the word. The focus this week was on the vowel short A. ie--bat, cat etc. The students used the app Magnetic Letters to practice spelling their sight words. Students continue to use the apps Intro to Math and Numbers to assist in number recognition, counting and patterns.
Literature: "Clifford's Family," "We Share Everything," "Apples," "How Do Apples Grow," "It Wasn't My Fault," "My Family," "Apples, Apples, Apples."
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