What a busy week we have had in our classroom this week! It is such pleasure to be working with your children. They have grown in so many ways!
We have been busy in Math this week continuing our unit on teen numbers. We continue to use our unifix cubes and tens frames to show what a teen number means - how many groups of ten and how many ones? We are also working on communicating orally what we are doing and the step by step process that we are using. This is quite a challenge!
We are almost finished with our true story/narrative unit in Writer's Workshop. This week we focused on 'telling our story across our fingers' (making sure that it was in the order that things really happened). We also were making sure that our story had punctuation so that it read smoothly. Did everyone get it all correct? NO - but we are working hard on it and will be all year long! We also focused on adding more details to what was already written - whether it be more sentences, more details in the illustrations, or speech bubbles. We continue to focus on vowels in words, spacing between words, and putting down as many letters in a word as possible by 'tapping out' the sounds heard.
We continued learning about bears this week. The children are intrigued by them! We continued reading both fiction and non-fiction books and created a fun project in which we had to create sentences that were from both categories. Be sure to read this project with your child. It came home on Wednesday! At the end of the week we began discussing polar bears and penguins, both of which the children find equally fascinating!
Parent-teacher conferences have started. I am looking forward to meeting with all of you and telling you all of the wonderful things that your children are doing! If you are not sure what time/day you signed up for, please e-mail me and I will let you know. See you all soon!
Thank you to Jake's Mom for being our Mystery Reader this week!
Conversation Starters:
- How do brown and black bears scratch their backs? (they move back and forth against a tree trunk)
- Where do baby bear cubs do if they are afraid? (climb a tree)
- What do some bears use their claws for? (to turn over rocks to find insects; to climb trees)
- If a cub gets tired walking, what does a mother bear do? (carry it in her mouth)
How You Can Help:
- If you are participating in the 'Read To Succeed' program be sure to be putting the times down on the reading log. The forms are due on February 1st.
- Continue to practice addresses! Many of the children have learned them already when just a few weeks ago they did not know them! They are awesome! Phone #'s will be next! Thank you for your help!
Looking Ahead:
- Someone Special Reminder: Tate Kross
- Wednesday 1/25, Thursday 1/26, and Friday 1/27 - Parent-teacher conferences, student dismissal 11:30 each day
