September 8th-11th

Michael and Cole playing Guess Who. 

Ella and Josephine coloring.

Ms. Leslie stopped by to help us with centers for the first time. 

Lily can swing so high!

Hello!

**I wanted to go ahead and announce our VERY FIRST PLAY! Our fairytale play will be October 15th at 11:00 in our classroom. We will be sending play lines home (for you to start practicing with your child) very soon. We will handle "costumes" here. :)

**No school on Monday the 14th or the 23rd of this month. Do not forget! Scholastic orders are due at the end of the month. Be sure to place your orders before the 30th.

** Check out the sign up genius for parent volunteers next week. If you have never volunteered before, you will need to fill out paperwork at the front desk. You will also need to watch a video and be background checked. After you have done those things, you are free to volunteer as much as you want!

We had a busy week! Read below to find out what we did.

Marvelous Me:

We are still getting through everyone's names. Marvelous Me works on so many wonderful things! When we study each person's name we look at vowels, consonants, syllables and how to properly write their name. We use a capitol letter at the beginning and lowercse letters for the rest of the name. We also study how many letters are in the name. Often children will find similarities and differences between that name and others in the class.

Writer's Workshop:

We had our first writer's workshop yesterday and it was a blast! Each time we write, we have a short mini lesson and then everyone has time to write books, poems, letters etc. At the end we have author's chair and someone gets to share their creation. It was awesome!

Reading:

This week we played a really fun game called Swat. Two players hold fly swatters. The teacher calls out a letter or letter sound and the first person to swat at the correct letter/sound gets to keep it. For children who needed a challenge, we started with site words. We also started reading centers. We have the listening center (books on tape), play dough letters/words, lego words and letters, letter matching games,  the Boggle game and more. Each day the centers are different but they always focus on letters, sounds and words. We also practiced buddy reading and reading independently.

Mini Paper Books: These mini paper books that we send home are so important! Please do not throw these away. These books work on tracking words. When your child reads the book to you, have them use their finger and touch each word as they read. We also work on a another reading skill called, rerun sweep. When your child gets through with the top line, have them return sweep and start all the way at the left to read the next line on the page. This helps reinforce the idea of reading left to right. Be sure to make a special place in your home for these familiar re-reads. This really helps children feel good about reading because they can read all of these! But it also focusses on certain pre-reading skills. Make a special box for these books by decorating an old shoe box. Or carve out a special place on their book shelf!

Math Workshop:

We had the same review games as last week. We are still playing roll and cover, roll and record and we are counting collections (although the number of objects in the bag change). We also added a new game. We played roll a tower build a tower. Children roll a dice and then they have to build a tower however many cubes high. Each time the two players roll they have to announce who has more and who has less or if they are equal. We are also practicing our numbers. We are learning how to write numbers 1-9. Hopefully tomorrow we will learn another math game called Handy Dandy. Player 1 picks up two piles of counters and says "handy dandy maple candy which hand do you pick?" Player 2 chooses a hand and counts how many are there. Then the players switch. We are still working on accurate counting and some children have started working on counting by 2's, 3's, 5's and 10's as a challenge.

Science:

This week we tried the dancing raisins experiment. We placed clear soda in a glass and watched the raisins "dance." Ask your child for details! Hopefully we will have a parent sign up next week to do a really cool experiment too.

Thematic Centers:

We started our first round of thematic centers this week. We are studying fairytales and the first one we are learning about is The 3 Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. We are reading several different versions along with the original and rotating through 4 centers. We are also learning about the different characteristics of fairytales. There are good guys and bad guys. There is usually a moral to the fairytale story and there is usually a happy ending!
Our centers:

1. Make a muddy piggy using paper plates, paint and construction paper. These will be hanging in the hall.
2. Make a wolf fact book using illustrations and words.
3. Make a fill in the blank mini book and take it home to read it to your families.
4. Make a trifold project of a straw house, stick house and brick house using different materials.

Have a great long weekend!
Hugs,
Mrs. Schultz