Monday, October 21, 2013

UPDATES for 10/15-10/18 2013

**There is beginning to be a chill in the air.  The students are commenting on the the change in temperature, pants and long sleeves, the leaves beginning to fall from the trees and and the anticipation of Halloween and costumes!
**REMINDER--Our Walking Field Trip to the MAZE LIBRARY is this WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23rd.  We will depart from school at 8:30 am.--walk to the library--tour and activities from 9:00-10:45 and return to school by 10:15 am.  If you completed a library card application for your child, the card will be in your child's folder. We will be walking with Ms. Ricchio's class.  Mr. Jun, Mr. Bernacchi and Ms. Barnett will join us as chaperones. 
** Our All School FUN RUN FUNDRAISER is this Friday, October 25th.  Kindergarten will be running at 8:15 am.  Stop by to cheer us on!!  Go to the Irving website to submit a pledge amount.
**Route to Reading Rotation 1 will conclude on Wednesday, October 23rd.  At that time, you will receive information on your child's skill assessment.
**Our Seasonal Babies Project is awesome!  Stop by and see our adorable baby pictures!  It will be up the for the rest of the year.
**Pajama Day was lots of fun.  Lots of cute pajamas, fuzzy slippers, bath robes, and stuff animals and blankeys.  
**Congratulations to our Student Council reps, BLAINE and SAMUEL!  They will attend their first meeting of Student Council on Tuesday under the direction of Mr. Gray and Ms. Pelling.
**Green Team reps, Reid and Gina will attend their second meeting on Tuesday.
**Our class will be observing Digital Citizenship Week.  The students will have a short lesson each day on staying safe online.  The lessons will be geared toward their age level. 
**General information on our Halloween Festivities was sent home on Friday.  Students can bring their costumes and accessories in a bag to school.  The students will have regular morning activities and lunch.  At 1:00 pm, they will change into their costumes.  I will need some volunteers to help with costume changing.  Parade begins at 1:30 pm.  The parade route will be outside around the school grounds.  Our classroom activities will be immediately following.  Our room parents are taking care of the details.  In keeping with our non violent classroom atmosphere,  please do not send toy guns, swords, hooks, light sabers,  poles, knives, brooms or handcuffs.  Students may bring a treat if they wish. (candy or non-candy) that will go in the treat bags we are making to be sent home.  Room parents will have a healthy snack on hand.  Parents and sibs are invited to attend both events.
** In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey continued her lesson on feelings and personal safety.
** In Mr. Packer Math Enrichment, Mr. Packer did a cool activity on positional words beside, above, below and on with shapes.
**Future FIELD TRIP to BROOKFIELD ZOO--Friday, November 15th from 9:00 -2:30 pm.  More information to come.
This week:
It was all about the culmination of apple mania.  The students discussed the sequence of events surrounding the making of apple sauce.  They key words--recipe and ingredients.  They observed the apple peeling machine work its magic.   They discussed the cooking process.  The students sorted the apple stars, bottoms with the left over flower or blossom and the skin that came off like a ribbon.  With all the ingredients in the the pot,  the apple sauce cooked for 20 minutes.  The students put the finishing touches on it by smashing it with a potato masher to make it smoother.  Lots of language and conversation.  The students sampled the finish product as part of snack time.  They read both fiction nonfiction stories about apples.  Our station day activities included apple print trees, pattern block build, count and record, writing prompt/illustration.....In the fall i like to..... and apple star prints.
Reading/Social Studies:    The students completed Unit 1 Families in the Treasures Reading series.  They used a variety of partner and small group games to review upper and lowercase letter recognition, sound/symbol relationships at the beginning and ending of words, syllable counting,  (1-5 syllables) sight vocabulary and work with sound blending strategies and word families.  Workstations this week centered around practicing spelling sight word vocabulary on the ipad app Magnetic Board and composing  short sentence using their words, drawing and writing--a picture of themselves as a baby and now as a 5-6 year old making a comparison about how they have changed in writing, leveled reading and discussion of story elements and using question words, reader's response where the group reads and discusses a story and states a response of whether they liked the story or not and illustrate a part of the story including labeling parts.  We will begin Unit 2 Friends next week.
Math:    The students continue work on counting quantities to 15, one to one correspondence to 15 and recognition of numbers 0-15.  They used their number cards in a variety of games including the partner game Top It, where each partner draws a number and the partner with the greater number gets the cards, Got It--number recognition where you roll the dice and color in that number on your recording sheet, Heads or Tails, where you flip a penny and use tally marks to keep your score, number puzzles-matching written number to the number of seeds on the apple and sequencing number cards from smallest number to largest and from largest to smallest.  The students also reinforced positional concepts and basic shape and pattern block recognition.  The concept of "greater than" and "less than" were explored.
Writing:     The students completed their practice of Frog Jump Capitals.  They continue to work on starting at the top of the page when forming a letter.   The students worked in their orange practice books.  They are working on their writing posture--sitting up straight, one hand holding the pencil and the other holding down the paper.  Beginning sentence structure is being worked on--begin each sentence with a capital letter, space between words in a sentence and have some kind of ending mark.  Sentences should name (noun) and tell (action word.)  Students are beginning to use more inventive spelling and their illustrations are slowly containing more details.  Next week, the students will transition into their next writing journal with lines for upper and lowercase letters.
Technology:    The students continue to use the iPad as a tool to enhance their learning.  No new apps were introduced this week.  The students continued to work on apps that explore letter/sound association, letter matching, word practice, segmenting and blending, number matching, number recognition, counting and creativity.
Literature:    "The Pumpkin Patch," "The Bumpy Little Pumpkin," "The Four Seasons," "Autumn days," "Picking Apples," "Colorful Leaves," "Mixed Up Fall."


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