Mrs. Henry's Classroom: Newsletter 10/5

We love our emergent storybooks! Students are learning to tell the story by looking at the picture, use the exact words the character says, and include connecting words like "Once", "then", "next", and "finally". We are also searching for sight words that we've learned: the, I , see and a. Students will be bringing home a chosen storybook to "read" to you next week.

In Writing Workshop, we learned how to "stretch" out words with our pretend rubber bands, hearing as many sounds as we can and then identifying the sound using our letter line and keywords. Everyone is working so hard to match sounds to letters! Some students are even using "finger spaces" between words. We also learned that we can make our stories more than one page long, telling more of our story or teaching more about our topic. When we make stories longer, we can use the connecting words that we studied in Reading Workshop!

We did our first Exemplar with Miss Coyne in math this week. We read a story problem about two boys who had toy trucks. One had 5 and another had 6. One thinks he has a greater amount than the other. Does he? How do you know? How can you SHOW that you know? This is a typical Exemplar, challenging students to understand a problem, think and plan about how to solve it and then show their thinking. There are multiple ways to solve this. We began with acting it out, then we used manipulatives, then we drew a diagram. We'll be working on these skills all year.

We used the Chrome Books for the first time this week and logged on to Dreambox. Please remember that your child should not be using Dreambox at home until further notice.

We did another Second Steps lesson this week and we learned how focus our attention using an "attentiscope". Focus is the first of our Skills for Learning. See the sheet sent home on Wednesday for more information.

We began a unit on clouds in our science lessons. We went outside and tried our best to draw the clouds we observed. After we made our diagrams we added labels describing the clouds. Then, when we looked back up at our clouds, they had MOVED! Woah! Why?

News & Notes:

your family's safe meeting place due on 10/12
field trip bus money due 10/20
no Scholastic book order in October. Please visit our Ox Ridge Book Fair instead!
Kindergarten Halloween parade 10/31 at 9:45 a.m. More info to come...
Please remember, no jewelry or accessories in class. Children are distracted by these items; they end up in their mouths, or lost/broken. Best to keep special things safe at home. Thank you.