Weekly News Jan 23-27

What a crazy week with scheduled (and surprise) days off!  Though we missed some of the fun of Celebrate New Directions week, we made the best of our time together.  We kicked our morning off with a school parade through classrooms which was a super way to acknowledge each of the classes and how special they are to our school!  Our class got to lead the parade, so I didn't get a video, but I believe there is one up on our Facebook page!!


Important Dates and Reminders:

February 7: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
February 14: Red, white and pink day and possibly 100th day of school celebration
(weather pending)   
February 23: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
February 24: NO SCHOOL
February 27: Family Night (more info to come)

Here is what our FULL week of learning will look like:

Reading:  We are certainly growing leaps and bounds as readers!  Your child should be coming home with new leveled (different colored dot books).  Also on Monday look in his/her book bag for new a Matching Books to Readers sheet that will detail the skills and expectations of these new levels.  Please let me know if you have questions or need ideas on supporting this new reading at home.  This week we will continue to use all we know about letters, pictures and word chunks to solve unknown words and really understand what is happening in a book to assist us.  We will be specifically looking at word endings and realizing we can use what we know about sight words to read words that may appear tricky to use (plays, played, playing).

Writing: As writers this week we will be adding tips and warnings to our how to books.  Adding these will help readers be able to follow the steps in our books.  We will also attempt to add comparisons in our writing to show more detail and will be recharging our 'idea banks' by challenging ourselves to write about things we do at school each day.  Of course we work daily as writers to use sight words, work on neat punctuation and be brave spellers.

Math:Math this week will focus on sorting shapes by attributes (size, color, number of sides), showing teen numbers in more than one way and looking at groups of objects and numerals and determining if they are equal or not equal to one another.  We will also take time to model and then write the steps we take to solve story problems.  This will be a great way to push the kids to think about their thinking as well as connect writing and math.  Our math centers this week will be:

• Playing "What's Missing" (a game with shapes)
• Organizing math tools in different arrangements to show teen numbers
• Using dominoes to tell and solve story problems
• Working on math work book pages to promote fluency in quantity representation and addition and subtraction within 5.

Social Studies: Students will get a chance to work in small groups to explore the centers we learned about last week.  They will take turns acting out different family scenarios from pictures, interviewing and reporting their findings about a classmate's family, listening to books about families on the ipads and writing their own books about their families

Word Work:  As you hunt for sight words in books, you may want to look for sight words that are 'disguised' with endings and help your child to read the part they know, think of what sounds the ending has and then read the whole word together.