Newsletter 1/13

We continued our "Bigger Reading Powers" unit this week.  We learned how to play "Guess What's Next!" with our partners while reading books that have patterns.  We also began a new anchor chart to help us check our understanding of what we've read.  We learned to think to ourselves "Does it make sense?" and "Does it sound right?" before moving on the the next page.  If we really understand a story, then we can retell it.  We continued to practice retelling our books to our partners to check for full comprehension.  We are also studying how ABC books can help us become better readers- they are a fun way to remind us about letter/sound relationships.  We can also play the "Guess What's Next!" game with ABC books, predicting what words and pictures will be on the next page for the next letter of the alphabet.  See our anchor chart with other ideas in the photo below.

We are enjoying more books by Ezra Jack Keats.  This week we studied "Whistle for Willie".  We are tracking the character Peter to see how he grows and feels from story to story.

We focused on tidying up our narrative story writing this week.  We checked to see that our stories had clear beginnings, middles and ends.  We also worked on including how we felt in the stories, because emotions make the story more interesting.  Lastly, we tried to write with more spaces, punctuation and lower case letters.

We did a lot of practice with a ten frame this week.  We used mini-marshmellows to depict numerals on a ten frame.  We also used ten frames to solve story problems adding numbers up to five.  We added numbers when we played a game called "Double Compare". Students played in pairs.  Each pulled 2 number cards from a deck, used various adding strategies to find the sum, and the player who had the higher sum won all the cards.  Lastly, we are doing a lot of work with pairs so we made some marvelous mittens that match!

We had a science unit on matter this week, studying different properties of various objects.  We sorted items that are natural vs. man-made.  We examined objects made of metal, wood and plastic and sorted them accordingly.  The next day we tested which of those items would repel or attract a magnet.  Lastly, we measured objects on a scale to see which were heavier than others.

In Second Steps, we learned that one can tell how another is feeling by looking at their friend's body language, but also by being aware of the situation that friend is in.  We continued our social studies lessons by learning a bit about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and what his dream was for our country.

Enjoy your day off on Monday!

News and Notes:

• THANK YOU to Mrs. Eising, Mrs. FitzPatrick, Mrs. Nichols and Mrs. Sedlock for playing games with us on Thursday!
• Scholastic orders are due by next Tuesday.  Please note that if you place an order outside of our ordering window, it will not automatically be placed, but will sit in the cart until next month's order is placed.  
• Book bags due on TUESDAY

  

  A new anchor chart for Reading Workshop fun

  
  

  

  What is heaver?

  
  

  

  What is attracted to a magnet?

  
  

  

  Double Compare- she's got the higher sum!

  
  
  
  
  

  

  Marvelous Mitten Pairs

  
  

  

  A scientific table

  
  

  

  Writing about Peter

  
  

  

  Mini Marshmellow math!