**We had a lovely fall afternoon for our Halloween Parade around the school grounds. Super heroes, princesses, vampires and other cool creatures were some of the fun costumes worn by the students. A BIG THANKS to our room parents and all who helped us celebrate the afternoon.
**Our 50th Day of School is MONDAY, November 7th. Come dressed in your 50's attire! It can be as simple as a white tee shirt and blue jeans, ponytails for the girls, slick back hair for the boys, sunglasses, leather jackets. If you should have a poodle skirt--WOW! We will have a "sock hop" of favorite tunes and math workstations with activities relating to the number 50.
**The Mexican Dance Assembly is scheduled for Monday, November 7th at 10:00 in the gym.
**Route to Reading Rotation 2 will conclude on Wednesday. Look for information on your child's skill mastery in their homework folder.
**Trivia Night (adult only) Fundraiser is Thursday, November 10th at 7:00 pm at The Wire.
**Information on our next FIELD TRIP to Brookfield Zoo--Tuesday, November 22nd is in your child's homework folder. Please sign and return permission slip with money. Thanks! I would love to have 4 more volunteers for the trip. Right now I just have one. Email me if interested.
**Picture Retake Day is Wednesday, November 9th beginning at 8:30 am. Please email me to let me know if anyone is having picture retaken. Thanks!
**Join in the Student Council sponsored PENNY CHALLENGE to help "Doctor's Without Borders." Bring in any loose change (pennies, silver money or paper) the weeks of November 7th-18th. Each classroom will be keeping track and collecting points for money brought in. It's for a great cause. Help contribute!!
**NO SCHOOL on Tuesday, November 8th Election Day! On Monday, the students be voting in a mock election for book characters--Bad Kitty and Scaredy Squirrel. Who will win????? Mr. Packer will also hold a school wide election for the 4 candidates running in the real election. All students have filled out their voter registration cards.
**Come on out for FAMILY MATH NIGHT on Thursday, November 17th from 6:00-7:30 pm. This years theme is a "Guess Who" using math clues and detective fun! Information on the event was in last weeks homework folder. Families need to sign up. Email me if you need a flyer.
** Author Matthew Cordell will visit Irving School on Thursday, December 1st at 12:45 in the Library. Ms. Noonan will be sending a form to purchase a book this week.
**FUTURE EVENTS--December 9th afternoon--23rd Annual Gingerbread Baking in Room 110 as part of our Celebrations and Traditions theme. We need lots of helpers. No experience needed. I will provide the cookie dough, cookie cutters, sprinkles, aprons. YOU provide the baking sheets, rolling pins, spatulas and love! Email me if interested. Also--KDG-1 WINTER CONCERT is December 21st being performed twice--once at 8:15 am and again at 9:30 am. More info forthcoming.
**NO SCHOOL-11/23-11/27--Thanksgiving Holiday.
**In our Second Step lesson this week the students discussed the idea of having empathy--the ability to feel or understand what someone else is feeling. The students looked for body clues, point of view, how can I help! and what is a kind thing to say?
**In Friendship Club this week, Dr. Bey Bey continued working with the students on ways to be a good social detective and doing the expected.
**In Mr. Packer 's Thinking Skills this week, the students worked on sequencing events in the story, "The Little Red Hen."
This week:
It was all about what an election is, who can vote in it, what are you voting for, what a ballot is and what makes a good leader. Lots of thoughtful conversations and discussion. We used the text, "Duck for President," to kick off the week. The students worked on story elements including characters, setting, key events and main idea. Who was a better leader--Duck or Farmer Brown--why? What were your supporting details? The students also took a look at what life was like in the 1950's. WHAT--no cell phones, colored tv's, microwaves, computers/tablets??!! What's a record player??How did we ever survive!! The students did a group Venn Diagram of comparing the 1950's and now. Station day activities included following directions to make "Duck," working on our class nature scrapbook, group thoughts on what makes a good leader and finishing up our Time of Year/Seasonal Babies bulletin board. (It's super cute!)
Reading/Language Arts: The students continue work in Unit 2 Friends in our Treasures Reading series. They built background knowledge about how friends around the word share different activities and who can be a friend. They listened to the Big Book story, "Friends Around the World." They made connections looking and listening to the activities and places in the world where friends lived. We looked up these countries on the world map. Students reviewed sounds M, S, A, P. The students also began work using their elkonin boxes to sequence sounds (beginning, middle, end) in order to sound blend them into a word. Robust Vocabulary included WORLD, GAMES, PLEASANT, ASSIST, HONEST. The students worked on identifying the main topic of our Big Book story. They elbow chatted about what they knew and told their partners 3 details from the story. Students reviewed all sight vocabulary presented thus far. The students also reviewed the function of a speech bubble to show who is speaking in a selected text. In the Haggerty Blue Book exercises, students continue to work on isolating beginning and ending sounds, segmenting and blending CVC words and substituting the beginning sound in a word to create a new word. Workstations this week included leveled readers story elements/comprehension/main idea and fluency, sound blend and rainbow writing cvc words, walking your words, at and an family word work, working with short a, writing about what 2 friends might say to each other using speech bubbles and sentence building subject/action.
Math: The students practiced counting to 50 and writing each decade. In our Eureka Math lessons, the students worked on numbers 7, 8, 9 in vertical and horizontal configurations and matching objects to the quantity. Using these numbers, they continue to work on the concept of one more, counting down, finding a missing number in a sequence and writing the number to show how many. We took a look at hidden partners for 7, 8, 9. Math workstations included counting quantities and recording the number, finding the missing hidden partner, writing numbers to 50.
Writing: The students worked on Starting Corner capital letters U, V, W. They practiced formation on their mini boards and applied what they learned in their orange practice books. In Writer's Workshop this week, students went through their writing folder and selected a piece to put a cover on. They also shared their writing piece with a partner. In the next set of workshop lessons, the student were each assigned a writing partner. With their writing partners, the students can chat about true story ideas, read their writing to the partner and seek feed back from their partner on their writing. I reviewed teaching points about making their writing easier to read--spaces between words, using their knowledge of sound blending to stretch out and record all the sounds they hear in a word, to use their question words-who, where, what, why, when and how, sequencing the events in their story (beginning, middle, end) and using an ending mark. The students also review how beginning writers, like beginning readers, use pictures to help them make meaning and generate language.
Science: The students wrapped up Investigation 1-Observing Trees. They created a scrapbook of the nature they collected around our adopted White Oak Tree. Back in class, the organized the what they collected and worked in small groups on each page. The categories they selected where samples of bark, food, leaves, trigs/branches and rocks. It was great to see them working collaboratively in their small groups. We will keep the book in our classroom. The students have explored trees in their immediate area. We read an article about environments where trees can grow. The students looked at different land form cards. Can trees grow on mountains? around rivers? deserts? valleys? oceans? We also read and discussed an article about what plants need to grow. The students made a list in their science notebooks. Their list included water, light, roots, soil/dirt, food, space. The most important being water and light. In Investigation 2, the students began to take a closer look at leaves. Stay tuned for more!
Technology: In reading whole group and some small groups, the apps Magic Reading 2 and Montessori Crosswords were used to reinforce sound blending in cvc and ccvc words, consonant blend and digraphs and Oz Phonics for sentence word order and beginning and ending sound recognition. In math whole group, the apps Easy Match for dice and domino patterns, subitizing and adding and Brainy Bugs for counting, cardinality and mazes.
Literature: "Duck for President," "I Can Be President Too!" "If I Were the President," "So You Want to be President," "The White House," "Grace for President."
No comments:
Post a Comment