Weekly News Sept 16-20

Our first full week was a total success!  The students continue to impress me with the way they are adapting to school and helping to support each other as learners and friends!!

Upcoming events:

September 24: Family Night--more info to come soon!
October 2: Picture day-- you can send envelopes to school on or before this day!
October 4: NO SCHOOL for students
October 11:  Field Trip to Fire Station and Heckrodt (more info coming soon)

Reading: This week we will be starting a new bend in our reading unit, meaning the focus shifts a bit. We have been reading learn-about-the-world books (informational texts) to practice rereading and thinking about how pages go together. This week, we will begin to focus on reading old favorite storybooks. We have been reading books such as Mrs. Wishy-Washy, The Carrot Seed, and The Three Billy Goats Gruff throughout the last couple of weeks. Now, we can “read” by retelling the story using the character’s voice and saying more and more of the story. Have your child practice reading a familiar book at home! They are great storytellers!

Writing: In writing, we will start to create books! Students are using packets of three or more pages to write about things they know about. First, they plan what they are going to write about by pointing to the page and talking through their book. Then, they draw and write! Later this week, we will be working with writing buddies that will ask questions about our writing; this will help students to look over their writing and start to think about revising. Finally, we will continue to stretch out words to label our work.

Math: Mathematicians will learn about adding and subtracting this week. We will also discuss the partners of a number. Partners are any numbers that work together to make another number (i.e. 3+1 and 2+2 are partners of 4). We will build numbers using many different materials including our purple, blue, and red tiles
   Here are what they look like!



Social Studies:  Each person in our classroom has now chosen and illustrated a hope and dream for the school year!  These will be displayed all year as a way to remind us of the important things we are working toward.  We are in the process of creating rules for our classroom that will help us reach those hopes and dreams.  In the next two weeks we will practice what it looks, sounds and feels like to follow these rules and will also discuss what happens when we forget to follow the rules (which will happen, of course).  My hope for this is that students take greater ownership over the rules and grow to understand how to help one another follow them and to also understand how to fix or change things when we forget to follow a rule.