Dec 11-15

This  month's school focus is BE Caring!  Last week classrooms buddied up with another grade level classroom and watched and discussed some videos that showed various acts of caring.  Students then drew or wrote what caring was to them and this display was created.  The kids amazed us with what they had to say about caring for others and why it is important at this time of the year and always!!

Here is our school newsletter for December.

Important dates and reminders:

12/12: NO SCHOOL
12/13: Holiday Wear Day
12/21: PJ Day
12/22-1/1: NO SCHOOL

Here is a peek at our week:

Math:  We wrapped up unit 2 with a test on Friday.  I will be meeting with each student to go over the test and celebrate success and fix any mistakes (that's how our brains grow).  Keep your eyes peeled for tests to come home in folders this week.  We will also being unit 3.  The main focus of this unit will be: developing awareness of numbers 11-20 and recognizing these numbers as groups of 10 tens and extra ones.  As in all units we will continue deepen our understanding of addition and subtraction and showing expressions that match story problems as well as writing our own story problems to demonstrate our knowledge of addition and subtraction equations.  We will also work to understand and become more fluent with partners of numbers.  

Reading: We have been working incredibly hard to read unknown words by using picture support, syntax (how a book sounds) and the letters sounds at the beginning and end of a word.  This week we will continue to check our reading by asking all three of these things at the same time.  We will learn that when books have more words and more detailed pictures we need to study the pictures more closely to really understand what is happening to help us read the words.  Finding our snap words in disguise (looking, sees, looked) will also be a powerful strategy we will work on this week.  Thank you for taking the time to read with your child each night and to return their books and book bags to school each day!  Your support is so appreciated!

Writing: This week our writing focus will be on revision.  We will add details in our pictures to make our stories come to life and will add beginnings to our stories.  We will also be introduced to flaps as tool to quickly revise and add on to our writing.  We will even use a different color pen to revise so the changes we make to improve our writing can be visible to ourselves and others.  This is serious and important work!

Social Studies: Our holiday unit is up and running!  This week we selected and studied 4 holidays we didn't know much about.  Those holidays were:  Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Cinco de Mayo and Veteran's Day (very eclectic, I know).  This week we will study the familiar holidays we selected: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and St. Patrick's Day.   Each day we have been reading a non-fiction text closely and then discussing what we learned AND writing about it!  The kids are blowing me away with conversations and writing they are doing around these topics!

Fundations: Last week we wrapped up our first unit in Fundations.  Our next unit will focus using letter sounds to more easily spell new words.  To do this we will "tap" words to hear beginning, middle and end sounds.  This is something we have been doing in writer's workshop, but now we will be doubling up on our practice with this.  Check out this video to see "word tapping' in action.  It is a first grade video, but explains the process well!