January 26th-30th

Hello! It has been a busy week so far. We really enjoyed the play yesterday at the Children's Theatre! It was a mix of Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse and Julius the Baby of the World. It was neat. Thankfully we read both books before we went so we could understand the plot.

We are busy assessing and getting ready for report cards and conferences in room 134. The conference sign up has been sent out. If we did not meet last time, I would really like to meet this time. Thank you!

Please continue to practice the play lines. We want everyone to feel comfortable saying their lines. :)

Thematic Centers:

This week (and continuing through Monday) we will be studying Helen Keller. What a marvelous hero! We learned that she was blind and deaf. We spent time thinking about how hard this would be and we could not imagine. We read many non fiction books about Helen and rotated through 4 centers:

1. Walk around the school blind folded with a teacher and experience what it would be like to navigate the world blind.
2. Take a cracker and spread icing on it and use skittles to spell the letters of your name like they would be spelled in braille.
3. Make and read a book about Helen Keller.
4. Spell your name like it would be spelled in braille using glue dots (then let it dry and experience braille).


Math Workshop:
We are working on our subtraction skills but taking it a step further. We have been working on coming up with different ways to get a number by using subtraction and addition. We have also been working on fact families just a tiny bit as we work on representing numbers different ways.
Example for the number 10: 10-6=4, 10-4=6, 6+4=10, 4+6=10, 10 tally marks, 10 on the number line etc. Our range cards from last year really helped with this!

This week we addressed these standards:
-generating equivalent expressions for a number
-using numbers and standard notation
-connecting numbers and standard notation to the quantities and actions they represent.

We have the same math tubs as last week. Many tubs are review as we pull teacher tables to learn new math concepts. Next week the tubs will change.

Reader's Workshop:
This week we are working on comprehension and retelling again. We reviewed our comprehension beanie baby strategies and we also worked on retelling those stories using writing. Like a summary on the back of the book, short retells of stories can help us decide if we want to read the story or not. To help us retell the story, we straightened out our left arm. With our right hand we patted the top of our arm and told the beginning of the story, patted the middle of our arm and told the middle of the story and patted the bottom of our arm and told the end of the story. Since summarizing is difficult it helped. We also talked about the main idea versus details of the story. As we are comprehending we need to pay attention to both!

We are back with word study, leveled books and word sorts this week. Words this week are:
thick, look, see, may, this, your, bad, love, short and wave. We practiced these words using carnation heart letters and then got to eat them!

Keep working on those valentines! If you can send in a shoe box or cereal box like you did last year to put valentines in that would be great! We will cut a hole and cover it to decorate it here at school. We are also learning this fun song for Valentine's Day! See below and have your child teach this song to you.

Have a great week!
Mrs. Schultz

January 12th-16th

Hello! Please remember that we do not have school this Friday, Monday or next Friday. Crazy schedule! I already sent the sign up genius for next week.

-Laurel's Field Trip: Tuesday January 20th...sign up if you can help!
- We are in desperate need of Clorox wipes. Send in pack if you are able.
- Children's Theatre Play: January 27th
- American Hero Play: February 19th at 11:00 ***Last week I accidentally wrote that it was the 18th. I was off by a day! So sorry!! It is actually Thursday the 19th. Hope you can be here to see your child preform in the first play of the year! Play lines will DEFINITELY go home Friday! We have a teacher work day, so I will be sure to get those done first. :)


Thematic Unit:

This week we studied Neil Armstrong. He was the first man on the moon! We discussed how this made a huge impact on the world forever. We also discussed characteristics that make a good hero. Everyone has the opportunity to be a hero! We rotated through 4 centers this week but we will also continue them next week as well since we got a little behind. We will not start a new hero next week due to our 3 day work week.

1. Astronaut helmet made of a paper bag. We also discussed oxygen and gravity on the moon versus the earth while we made our helmets.
2. Phases of the moon book. Did you know there are 8 phases? Watch the moon at night to see how it changes!
3. Shaving cream earth or moon painting. You could pick between painting the moon or the earth using the shaving cream paint. By adding shaving cream to the paint, it made the planet become 3d. After you painted, you had to add a sentence relating the moon to the earth.
4. Oreo moon phases. Take an oreo and gently break it apart. Scrape the icing off for each phase of the moon and discuss how it changes. Eat the oreo at the end!

We look forward to making moon sand next week and learning a little more about Neil!

Reader's Workshop:

This week we focussed on comprehension. We learned 3 main things about comprehension and tried to do a better job of understanding our books while we read.

1. When readers really understand, their reading voices sound smooth.
2. When readers really understand, they can picture what's going on.
3. When readers really understand, they can retell their stories easily.

We also edited more of our writing books this week as well. This month we are studying opinion pieces and how to write our opinion on a topic. Thinking of an opinion to write about is surprisingly hard! We discussed the difference about fact and opinion and looked a little deeper at Martin Luther King's opinion speech called 'I Have a Dream.'

Word Study words this week are:
must
was
has
have
had

Hopefully the last week of January we will start getting 10 words each week! With all the days of school we are missing, we are wanting to wait until we have a full week to start this.

Please lookout for a letter coming home soon about starting Bare Books. Remember last year how we worked for months on a book that your child wrote all on his/her own? We are doing that again this year, but it will be a little different. It will involve more time and supplies from home. This letter will be sent via email in the next week or so, so that we have plenty of time to finish. We will still work a lot at school on these books as well. No panicking. ;)

Math Workshop:

We are still studying subtraction this week and reviewing all the strategies we have learned so far. We are having a difficult time wrapping our minds around this topic, so we are taking our time learning it. We worked all week (to get through the entire class) on the true or false subtraction sheet. Last week we played a game with this and this week, we put it on paper to see what we learned. This took forever because it was a multi step process. First you had to solve the equation, then you had to decide if it was true or false, then you had to write the equation in the right column and then you had to check your work! We also worked on subtraction story problems as a class and in small groups. We increased the numbers we were working with from last week to make it a little more challenging.

Have a great week and weekend!
Hugs,
Mrs. Schultz

January 5th-9th

Happy week back!

Announcements!

1. Be sure you check the school calendar this month. We have a few days off here and there.  January 16th, January 19th, January 23rd are all days that the kids do not come to school!

2. Work on those acrostic poems for Valentine's Day! If you need any help, please let me know.

3. January 27th: Our first big field trip! We are going to the children's theatre in Charlotte like last year. More info regarding chaperones will be sent out soon.

4. First play February 18th Heroes Play!! Our very first play of the year!! Play lines will hopefully be assigned this Monday! With my big move this weekend, it may be a little delayed. But I will do my best to get those out so you can start practicing.

Thematic Unit:
This week we hit the ground running. We started our new unit "American Heroes" and started with Martin Luther King. He was a great man! He fought for the equality of all people, no matter their race. We learned about diversity and how we are all equal. We also listened to a part of his long famous 'I have a Dream' speech. We rotated through 4 centers....

1. An egg experiment. Take a brown egg and a white egg and predict what they will look like on the inside. They look the same! Just like people look on the inside even if they have different skin colors.
2. Make two clouds. On one cloud write your dream and on the other cloud write Martin Luther's dream. Staple together and stuff with tissues so that it becomes a 3D cloud.
3. Martin Luther King mini book
4. Martin Luther writing sample: Write your dream on green line paper and glue on a piece of paper that has been stamped with two different skin colors of hands that are joining together.

Literacy:

This week in addition to our individual reading and writing goals, we learned how to summarize. This is hard work! First we started by summarizing different parts of one of our favorite upcoming play songs. Then we learned a "thinking stem" that can help us summarize. 'This book is about....' Then we tried summarizing our own writing books. This was neat but we definitely need more practice. You can summarize many things like poems, movies, books and songs. We are also working on acrostic poems. Hopefully practicing at school will help valentine writing go smoothly! We learned about adjectives and how they describe things. Adjectives are most definitely needed for acrostic poems.

Word study words this week: play, say, are, jump, make

Math:

We are still studying subtraction and all the strategies we can use to solve problems. We just started working on solving subtraction word problems. Just like our addition story problems, you must weed through the "fluff" to figure out what you need out of the story to solve the problem. We also added another piece to our game from before break called 'Roll and Record.' This time when you roll your dice and you subtract, you have to add your equation to the column where you record your answer. Then you get to see all the different combinations. We also played another game called 'True or False.' There were different subtraction problems listed and you had to determine if the equation was true or false. Example: 9-1=5 would be false.  8-2=6 would be true.

Happy weekend!
Emily Schultz