Week of November 26-30th

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving break!  I made it through without eating any turkey!  I know that’s weird, but I don’t really like turkey!  I hope you enjoyed the turkeys that came home begging you to eat more of something else!

This week, we are adding the sounds, long 0, and the chunk “ch”.  We are adding the words chimp, to , on, boat, and goat.

In reading, we have been talking about good vs. bad predictions before we read a story and during reading.  This would be great to practice at home!  We have also talked about real and make believe.

We are starting to rate our writing to work on being better writers.  We’re working hard to improve our writing on an individual basis since we’re all at different places.  It was fun to see the kids rate themselves and then push themselves to do better.

In math, keep working on those teen numbers.  I still have some kids having trouble recognizing a few numbers.  12, 13, and 15 seem to be especially hard for some reason.  This week we will start addition.

Next week, we will have our elf visit our class.  Everyday we will use what he’s doing as a writing activity.  Please don’t tell, it’s a surprise!  We will also be doing lots with gingerbread next week, including reading a ton of different gingerbread books and comparing and contrasting them, graphing, tasting, art projects, writing projects and even a science experiment to figure out why the gingerbread man didn’t just cross the river on his own instead of hopping on the fox’s nose!

Friday is crazy hair day.  Please remind your child that crazy hair doesn’t equal crazy behavior! 🙂  I won’t be here Friday.  My college roommate’s Mom died and I am flying to Denver for the funeral.  The kids were great for the sub on Mon. when I didn’t feel well, so please just remind them to be great again!

I have a request.  I have a ton of new math games that require decks of cards.  If you have any complete sets of cards that you wouldn’t mind donating, I’d appreciate it.  I have 4 sets that I bought at the dollar store.  You can get two sets for a dollar there.  I’d love to have a set for each child.  If you can help, I’d appreciate it!

Just a funny note to share.  Everyday at the end of the day, the kids have to wipe their tables clean with a wipe and stack their chairs.  I don’t keep track of who has wiped when, I just tell them their whole table has to agree on who is doing it.  Can I tell you EVERYONE wants to wipe the table!  (You might be able to use this at home!)  And to watch them figure it out together so that everyone agrees is pretty funny!  There’s never any rhyme or reason to their strategies!  They just all want to wipe! 🙂

I hope you have a great week!

Week of November 5-9th

Sorry for the late update.  My weekend just got away from me!

Reminder that book orders are due tomorrow.  I know several of you have $5 book coupons from the first order, don’t forget to use them!  I’ll do one more order before the holidays.  Let me know if you want me to keep them and give them to you because they’re gifts.

Midterms will come home this week.  I’ve been retesting kids on consonant sounds and the ones consistently missed are w, z, and v because we haven’t done those letter sounds yet!  No worries, we’ll have them before the end of the quarter!  Please continue to work on the teen numbers.  I still have kids struggling when counting that many objects.

This week, we added the letter Q and “oo” as in tooth.  We added the words tent, ant, hen, egg, nest, tooth, and moose.

In math, we will continue to work on counting to higher numbers and will soon start addition.

We are finished up with spiders.  Did they sing you the song??

This week and next, we will work on Thanksgiving and the journey of the pilgrims to America.

We started Read to Self and have increased our stamina to 5 1/2 minutes.  I had several kids mention on Friday that read to self is their favorite thing!  I’m starting to see some lightbulbs click on in the reading department!  We have reading groups everyday and work on those reading strategies.  Again, let me know if books in reading folders are too hard or too easy!

Have a great week!

Week of Oct. 29-Nov. 2

Have you heard about our ants?  The one and only time I LIKE ants is when they’re in our ant farm!  Today we read several expository books about ants and made our own informational books about ants.  They’re really fun to watch and learn about!

A big thank you to all who helped plan and put together the Halloween party.  I know the kids had a lot of fun!

This week, we added the words bell, math, bed, log, we, and nut.  We also learned the letter sounds of Nn (nibble) and Yy (yank a yo-yo).

We also learned about pumpkins and the life cycle of a pumpkin.  We read Bad Kitty and Kitten’s First Halloween and made a cat glyph that you can see hanging in our hallway.

We had to finish up bats on Monday, so you should’ve seen our informational books about bats coming home.  We also did an experiment to learn how echolocation works.  We had one person whisper into a paper towel holder and the sound bounced off a pie plate into the other tube that another person was listening through.

In math, we are working on the numbers 11-17 this week and will move up to 20 next week.  Keep practicing on those ten frames at home!  We’ve been working on our number books and the number pages to see that a number can be written in lots of different ways.  For example, ten frames, words, tally marks, number sentences etc.

Next week, we are going to learn all about Spiders!

Today we started Daily 5 and began with Read to Self.  We talked about the 3 ways to read a book: read the pictures, read the words, and retelling a story.  Then we made our rules about Read to Self so that everyone would know the expectations.  One of our rules is that we are going to try and increase our stamina of reading each day.  I will be using the word “stamina” a lot with them, so ask them about it at home.  We will be doing this everyday.  Today we did read to self for 4 minutes!  They were awesome!

Everyone got new books in their reading folders today.  Please be sure to keep them in their backpacks!

Reading minutes are due Monday at the latest if you haven’t already turned them in.

Well, I’m off to the Olathe East play off game tonight and tomorrow is another basketball tournament.  Boy, my kids are busy!  Thanks to those of you in Amber Meadows who got hit up by my daughter on Halloween!  She and some friends trick or treated in pink to collect change for the Susan G. Komen fund.  They raised $375 just in 2 1/2 hours!

Have a great weekend!  Enjoy the beautiful Fall weather.  I’d be happy if it just stayed like this!!