Wednesday, December 10, 2014

December 8th-12th

Hello families!

We were so excited this week that we got to attend two plays at school. We got to see the Nutcracker and our book buddies play. How special!

Announcements:

1. Please get your scholastic book orders in soon! They are due TODAY. This is a great time to order books for holiday gifts! The more you order, the more we can get for our classroom (which is really neat). We are doing online orders only this year.

2. Gingerbread house making and pajama day is December 18th. Please join us at 1:15 to decorate gingerbread houses! We still need mini milk cartons to pull this off. So far, we do not have any!

Thematic Unit:

This week we studied Wilma Rudolph. What a phenomenal women to study! Did you know that she had polio disease when she was younger? She later became known as the fastest women in the world. She had many brothers and sisters and overcame many obstacles in her life before she became a star. Even with her fame, she remained  humble and true to herself. We rotated through 4 stations.

1. Complete an obstacle course and try to bear your time with each round.
2. Illustrate your Wilma Rudolph fact book.
3. Create your championship medal and create 3 personal goals.
4. Trace and paint the olympic rings and study what the colors mean.

Reader's Workshop:

This week we have been looking at our writing in addition to our individual reading goals and word sorts. We have been discussing what it means to edit our own writing. Adding punctuation, capital letters where appropriate (and in some cases a brief synopsis on the back of what your book is about) are just some of the things we have been discussing. We have also working on our new phonograms. The tricky part here is not necessarily learning the rules....the tricky part is recognizing these in our reading and in our own spelling!

This week we went over "oo," "oy" and the silent e. We call the e on the end of words "strongman e." He is so strong that he makes the vowel in words say their name. In the word 'home' this week, strongman e makes the o say its name. Pretty neat!

Words this week are:
home
boy
dog
book
man

Math Workshop:

We have moved on to working on subtraction! We have learned various strategies and we also learned a new game called "counters in a cup". This game needs two players. The two players decide how many counters they are working with. They put some secretly in a cup and then the other player counts how many are outside the cup. That player then has to decide how many are in the cup. Students are likely to use their fingers or do this mentally. They also record their combinations. We are looking for several things with this one game. How do students figure out how many counters are hiding? How do students record their work? Do students understand that the number showing and the number hidden always equal the total number? Right now we are just trying to understand that subtraction is the opposite of addition. The total at the end will shrink instead of grow like in addition.


Our activities this week in math have addressed the following standards:

-Solving a problem in which the total and one part are known
-Finding and exploring relationships among combinations of numbers up to 10 (or higher for children who need a challenge)
-Developing counting as a strategy for combining two numbers
-Learning the (-) sign

Hope everyone has a great rest of the week and great weekend!

Hugs,
Mrs. Schultz

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