Jan. 17, 2011
I hope you are enjoying the beautiful snow and of course the shoveling that goes along with it!
A few reminders...
*please send your child's snowpants, boots, hat, mittens (maybe an extra pair as they get very wet during first recess) and an extra pair of socks every day! They will go outside every day (if it is not below 0 degrees).
*Parent/teacher conferences are Jan. 27 and Feb. 1. You may sign up for conferences on line. Thanks to those of you who already have.
*Our Pirate/Princess day is this Thursday, Jan. 20. Your kindergartner may wear pirate or princess clothes. No weapons please.
*Our field trip to the Environmental Education building was a huge success. Thanks to Mrs. Jenkins, Mrs. Escobedo and Mrs. Eklahare who chaperoned! If anyone took pictures please send them to me electronically so that I can put them on this blog.
*Our next field trip will be in May to the zoo and all parents will be welcomed to come. We will going to see the play "Miss Nelson Is Missing" at First Stage on June 4th. I will able to take 2 chaperones.
*No school this Friday, Jan. 21. (teacher planning day)
*This week and next week the children will be on the computer participating in MAP reading and math testing in the classroom.
What we are learning:
Readers workshop-
*We reveiwed usig picture clues to help us figure out unknown words
*We reviewed using getting our mouth ready to help us figure out unknown words
*We were introduced to a chart that is in our poetty that gives us different strategies to help us figure out unknown words.
*We learned what stamina is and how we need to read the whole time during read to self time. At this time, we are trying to read 15 minutes by ourself. Our goal is to read 20 minutes by the end of the year.
*We learned about connections. We made text to self connections to the book "The Mitten" by Jan Brett and "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day". We also made text to text connections with the books
"The Hat" and "The Mitten" both by Jan Brett.
*We compared and contrasted two different versions of the story "The Mitten".
*We learned the sight words "Did" and "can".
*We started to participate in literacy centers after our buddy reading time.
Writer's Workshop-
*We used to descriptive words to write about a snowman we created.
*We reviewed putting spaces between our words and using a popsicle stick to help us with this.
*We reviewed writing the sounds you hear.
*We learned that strong writers write about what they are doing and what they are going to do. We call this writing about their own lives. We are trying to practice doing this.
*We were given paper that has more lines on it so that we can write more than one idea.
Math-
*We played teen and twenty Bingo. This helped us write and recognize our "tricky teens" and our twenties.
*We solved winter story problems on the SMART board and then practiced by ourself.
*We learned what an addition, subtraction and equal sign look like and what they mean. We also practiced writing number sentences.
*We filled out a January calendar on the SMART board.
*We practiced writing our numbers by filling in the missing numbers in the snowflakes.
Science/Social Studies-
*We reviewed the five senses and the season of winter. We made a winter book about the five senses.
*We learned about the characteristics of living and nonliving. We worked with a partner to find pictures of living and nonliving things and then shared our chart with the whole group.
