February 23rd-27th

Hello and happy snow day!

"Mr. Jack" and I have been enjoying our first snow in our new house. I hope all of you have been having fun enjoying the weather.

I want to thank everyone for coming to the play yesterday. It was truly magical! After everyone left, we had a reflection and the kids talked about how much they learned and about all the fun they had. Thank you for taking the time to practice their lines and for supporting them yesterday.

Math:

This week we really focussed on perfecting the play but we also had a few lessons squeezed in the short time. For math, we learned about adding 10 more to a number and also learned about subtracting 10 less from a number. We used the hundreds chart at first and then we did this mentally. We had touched on this before but really worked on it this week. For children who needed a challenge we asked them to add 20, 30 and 40 more mentally. We had the same math tubs as last week.

Reading and Writing:

For reading, we got through a few kids with leveled books and we got out 10 new word study words. We did not get through our word sorts. Hopefully we will have a "normal" week next week and we will be able to do this. For writing, we learned about comics! Ms. Leslie gave us some really neat templates for writing comics and making speech bubbles. A huge hit! We also wrote thank you letters to military personal and gave them to the middle school practicum who is doing this as a service project. We edited these letters closely making sure to have site words spelled correctly, appropriate punctuation and capitalization. 

Thematic Centers:

This week we learned a lot about Eleanor Roosevelt. She had a heart of gold and was always thinking about others. We rotated through 4 things:

1. Make your new sew scarf to donate to a homeless shelter.

2. Pick up trash around the school with gloves and a trash bag.

3. Illustrate an Eleanor fact book.

4. Write and illustrate "I can _______ to make the world a better place. 

We also started brain storming for our bare books. This year we are doing something really neat with our bare books and we need your help! Please see the important letter in my email and pay close attention to the date we are asking that you have your items in. We really need to make sure everything is labeled as well!

Hugs,

Mrs. Schultz

February 2nd-6th

Hello!

There are lots of announcements so grab your calendar!

1. Winterfest is this Friday and should be lots of fun. We do this at school and parents do not need to come! :) Sorry for the miscommunication!
2. Play is February 19th at 11:00 in our classroom.
3. Our valentine's party is February 11th at 1:45. Come and join us if you can!
4. Please remember to send in your fleece fabric as we are making scarves soon.
5. This Friday is spirit Friday! Wear your spartans apparel and show your pride.

Thematic Centers:

This week we finished studying Helen Keller and started the Wright Brothers. We learned they were the first to have a successful flight! We rotated through 4 centers:
1. Make a candy airplane and write where you would like to fly to and why.
2. Illustrate the Wright Brothers' fact book.
3. Make a paper airplane and measure the flight distance.
4. Label the parts of an airplane.

Reader's Workshop:

This week we have been working on making connections to the stories we are reading. We worked on making text to self connections and text to text connections. A text to self connection would be: "I can relate to this story because I have a dog at home too!" A text to text connection would be: "This part of the book reminds me of the Eric Carle book we read last week. This book has a butterfly just like that book did."

For hundreds day, we also worked on a poem. This month's writing theme is "authors as mentors." We chose to start by studying Eric Carle as he has beautiful illustrations. Many children have chosen to write just like him this week!

Word study words this week are: fun, trade, robe, wash, baby, ring, kiss, toy, like and will
*Please do not forget to review the older words at home frequently as well. This really helps with reading and writing! We review a little here at school as well but as you go over your new words each week, it would be helpful to do a review of older words.

Math Workshop:

We played two new games this week and we loved them.
1. Out of this world: Draw a star card and place it in the middle. Use the hundreds chart to write the number above, below, to the left and to the right on the hundreds chard. Race against your partner or play on your own. This is getting us more comfortable working with the higher numbers.

2. Fact Families in Outer Space: Pull a card with three numbers and complete the 4 fact families as quickly as you can by yourself or with a partner. These are just like last week but you get to use a visa vi marker and a cool game-board!

These two games work on addition, subtraction and numbers up to 100. We also started working with time. Half hour and hour only! We are talking about this right before math starts and during morning meeting. If you want to talk about this at home, that would help us greatly! We discussed the short hand, the long hand and minutes versus hours this week.

Short week next week as we have conferences! No school Thursday or Friday.

Hugs,
Mrs. Schultz