**The students welcomed WINTER! The sounds of the season filled the auditorium! Our concert was fantastic! The singing, the instruments, the swaying and a few human menorahs!!! Many thanks to our own Ms. Hiolski and Mr. Mayer for their guidance. Our after the concert get togethers (not one , but two!!) were chock full of great treats and crafts. A huge thanks to our fabulous and organized room parents--C. Cummings, D. Frank, K. Jones, E. Loentz and S. Aylward for all their planning. The students were sure delighted to see parents, sisters, brothers and grandparents at the concert. It was great to see the parent/child, parent/parent and parent/teacher/child interactions between our Room 110 families. I am one lucky teacher to have such a supportive group of parents and students!
**Our BOOK BUDDY get together was awesome! Each student from our class was matched up with a 5th grade Book Buddy from Ms. Balicki's class.. They worked together to create a getting to know you book. We had lots of treats left over from our concert get together so all students helped themselves to the food. Our class taught the 5th graders how to play the Roll a Gingerbread Game. Very cool interactions. Some older students shared their favorite kindergarten experiences. Many of them were kindergarteners in my class!! We all ended the day raising our juice cups to salute our achievements of 2012 and welcome in 2013. The students cannot wait for our next meeting in January! A big thanks to Ms. Balicki's room parents for their help!
**Senorita Zaragoza talked to the students about the festival of Las Posadas. She shared a story and music about the procession in the streets re-enacting Mary and Joseph's search for an inn and the stable that became their room. I presented the story of the origin of Kwanzaa which began in 1966. The students pointed out the use of light represented by the special candle holder called a kinara. The students made connections in their own lives while listening to the 7 principle ideas of this African American celebration. I shared some traditional stories--"The Night Before Christmas," "The Nutcracker," "The Twelve Days of Christmas and its Southwestern counterpart, "Twelve Leaping Lizards." The students thanked Ms. D. (Mrs. Donaldson) our Tuesday helper by creating and illustrating a special card.
**A very special SHOUT OUT to Ms. Dennis, our truly dedicated classroom assistant who tirelessly works
to reach all students with her enthusiasm for learning! Cheer! Cheer!
**Classes resume on Monday, January 7th.
**Mid Year DIBELS testing will take place the first 2 weeks of January. Route to Reading Rotation 4 will begin on Tuesday, January 29th. All students are progressing on the Phonemic Awareness Continuum. Some students even moved into the Phonics Continuum!!
**Vision Screening for students will take place on Friday, January 18th.
**Reading Grandma Mary will begin her 6th year listening to young readers and helping them to shape their decoding and comprehension skills. We can't wait to see her!
**For those who are traveling--your travel journals went home. It will be great to share them in January. Safe travels to everyone going to a special place!
**Start saving those GIANT BOXES (the kind you can climb in) and other COOL stuff for our space station construction in APRIL during our SPACE THEME. I cannot store anything now. I will have you start bringing things in after spring break.
LOOKING AHEAD in 2013.....We will begin our next cross curricular theme--WINTER and Unit 5 Animals in our Treasures Reading series. We will also begin our first Science Unit--Properties of Water. In reading, the students will continue to focus on sound foundation, sound blending and segmenting 3-4-5 and even 6 phoneme words, work on decoding strategies, vowel sounds, oral and written comprehension skills and reading fluency. Our Busy Reader Club will begin. In the area of writing, the students will finish uppercase letter forms and begin formal lowercase letter formation, continue with inventive spelling, sentence structure, grammar and punctuation and expanding sentences to include adjectives. In the area of math, the students will continue rote counting to 100 and beyond, counting by 2's, 5's and 10's, identifying coins and their values, problem solving, counting down from random numbers and combining and decomposing sets (addition and subtraction) and telling time. The students will begin their process oriented math journals. Socially, the students will continue to work on becoming more responsible, independent learners and thinkers and continue to develop positive relationships with their peers and teachers. Technologically, the students will continue to use the iPad and internet resources to enhance all areas of the curriculum. WOW! We will be really busy!!!!
This week:
It was all about community with one another, family and friends. Our "Friendship Tree" looks amazing. Students worked together in pairs and groups to create chain patterns. Some student groups decided to link their chains together to form one giant one. They are displayed all around the room and cover our tree. The students wrote "Kindness Counts" notes to each other and pinned them to our Friendship board. Their sentiments to each other really touched my heart!
Reading/Social Studies: The students completed Unit 4 Food in the Treasures Reading series. The students built background knowledge around food traditions. This tied in nicely with our ongoing theme of traditions. The students were able to tell about their personal family food traditions including Thanksgiving turkey, New Years foods, Hanukkah foods, special Birthday foods and traditional Christmas foods. We discussed what a menu was. The students listened to the story, "Yoko." They worked together on making inferences, summarizing and making connections in the story to their own lives. They also reviewed the sight words have and to. These words were added to our daily Wacky sentence. The students are having so much fun unscrambling the daily mixed up sentence. We reviewed our target sounds Cc and Nn in isolation and at the beginning and ending of words. The students continue to use photo cards to sort nouns and verbs. Our Robust vocabulary for this week included MENU, DEVOUR, FRESH and DELICIOUS. Students used their elkonin boxes to sound blend 3-4 phoneme words. They practiced reading their decodable story, "Nat." The students made predictions about story content. The students listened to the tale, "The Three Wishes." They thought about --what if they had three wishes? What would they be? What were the man and woman's wishes in the story? A great journal prompt! The students listened and viewed pictures from the expository text, "Farming Then and Now." They responded about how farming has changed over the years. Students observed the use of animals and the gradual change to machines. Each student read the paper story, "I Have To," and retold it to a partner. There were many opportunities this week for students to practice their reading aloud. One workstations this week was a menu project where small student groups collaborated with each other to come up with a recipe for a food. Their recipe had to include nouns (what you need) and verbs (what you do) and how to sequence the steps. Each group had a different recipe. Maki Sushi, Layer Cake, Lemon Cake, Chicken Soup, Chocolate Gingerbread were the selections. The projects are on display throughout the classroom and hall. Lots of thought and working collaboratively went into these projects! The rest of the workstations included creating 3-4 phoneme word puzzles and sharing them with a partner, creating a store sign and labeling the foods on it and reading aloud and discussing the main idea of a leveled reader.
Math: The students continue to work on rote counting to 100 and beyond and counting by 10's and five's. The students worked on an introduction to the Calculator. They learned how solar power operates the calculators and the terms DISPLAY, ON/CLEAR, REPEAT KEY, PLUS SIGN and locating numbers. The students worked with counting on the calculator and making "one more". They also learned the counting shortcut. Many students participated in the battle of the Dreidel Game. Will was quite a master spinner and consistent winner!
Writing: The students are using their writing for many assignments. We have moved into writing conference mode where the students complete a writing assignment or journal prompt independently and then come to "conference" with me where they read their sentences and together we go over capitalization, grammar, spacing and letter placement. The students are working on starting center capitals A, I, T, J. All gingerbread writing assignments are displayed in the hallway. Ms. Dennis and I both commented this week on the transition most of the students are making in terms of becoming more independent writers! Go Room 110!!
Technology: In reading, students are able to use the iPads when the workstation is completed. Their choices this week have been the apps Spelling Bug Lite, Magic Reading 2 and 3, Rocket Speller.
In math, students have begun a project on using "Tricky Teens" with the app Doodle Buddy. The apps Number Find, Monster Squeeze, Sam Phibian, Top It-Addition and Math Bug are assisting students in reinforcing number recognition, counting, number order, adding numbers and working with number families.
It was great fun to track our first winter storm on weatherunderground. Students are learning to read a weather map. They are very interested in what the colors represent. The animate feature is cool. It allows students to see where the storm is going. Students were making predictions about how much snow we would have!
Literature: "The Nutcracker," "The Twelve Days of Christmas," "Twelve Lizards Leaping," "The Night of Las Posadas," ""Kwanzaa," "How Do Dinosaurs Celebrate Hanukkah?" "Together for Kwanzaa," "The Night Before Christmas," "Bad Boys Get Cookie," "Seven Candles for Kwanzaa," "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell," "Zero is the Leaves on the Tree," "How to Dinosaurs Say Merry Christmas?" "The Crunchy, Munchy Christmas Tree," "The Twelve Dogs of Christmas," (thank you, Kanohi!) "Magritte's Imagination" and "Magritte's Marvelous Hat." (thank you, Lucy!)
No comments:
Post a Comment