Weekly News Feb 6-10

We celebrated our reading super powers with a mini graduation on Thursday!  The boys and girls loved walking up to receive their reading diplomas while Pomp and Circumstance played in the background.  Here they are proudly showing off their Super Power diplomas!!

February 7: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
February 13: 100th day of school
February 14: Red, white and pink day and classroom Valentine exchange
February 23: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
February 24: NO SCHOOL

Here is a peek at our week:

Reading:  This week we kick off a new reading unit called Growing Expertise in Little Books.  This unit has a focus on non-fiction reading and really reading to gain understanding and learn from the books we read.  This week we will sort our classroom library to get all of our informational books organized so they are easier for us to shop for.  We will learn that as we read about a topic we become experts on it and learn to share that information with others by telling the main topic of a book and giving key details learned in the book.

Writing: Our writing unit will be greatly supported by our reading work as we will begin a new unit called All About Books.  The goal of this unit will be able to write across one topic for several pages including key ideas and details.  Students will be able to show off their knowledge of personal interest and will take such ownership over being topic experts.  This week we will create tiny topic notebooks to store our writing ideas and will be reading many All About books to help us understand the many ways we can show all we know about a topic.

Math: We are  approaching the end of Unit 3 in math.  We will work this week to solidify the major concepts in this unit: teen numbers, story problems and shape composition.  We will work hard to see and write the partners of a number as look at arrangements of math tools and pictures.  Our math centers this week will be:

• playing teen number Go Fish
• working with a friend to find the missing partner of a given number
• coloring and classifying by shape on a workbook page
• making arrangements of teen numbers with real objects   

Science: This week we will begin an new science unit that focuses on comparing and contrasting properties of wood and paper.  This will be a fun and hands on unit for the kids!  Stay tuned for more information in upcoming field trip to the Paper Discovery center in Appleton. 

Word Work:  As you work on sight words at home, one thing you can do to reinforce recognition and automaticity is to study the shape of the word and notice how many tall, short and "downstairs" letters a word has and to talk about other words that might look like that word.  We have been working on this in class and the kids have really become interested in it!