January 25th-29th

 Proud of their puzzle.

Proud of their puzzle. 

Painting like Michelangelo. 

Painting like Michelangelo. 

Painting like Michelangelo. 

Painting like Michelangelo. 

This is a bulky post but please read everything carefully! There have been some changes since the email.

Important Dates:

2/2 Groundhog Day: You do not need to do anything, I just wanted you to know. :) In my email, I had is written down as 2/1. My mistake!

2/3 100's Day at school! Dress your child like they are 100 years old and allow them to bring in a collection of 100 items of their choice to share and count. ****This has changed since my email!! Due to the snow day, Hundreds Day is now February 3rd!! Be sure to note this change in your calendar.

2/4 Book Fair for our class 10:00-10:30- Feel free to come and shop with your child or send money for them to pick out something special!

2/10 Valentine Poem Reading Party at 1:00 in our classroom. All parents are invited to help us read our poems!

2/11 & 2/12 No school for kids/optional parent teacher conferences 

2/15 No school

2/18 Art Gallery Crawl at 11:00 in our classroom and all parents are invited!

2/23 Field Trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home

So do not forget to: Dress like a 100 year old and bring a collection of 100 things on Wednesday, bring book fair money or come shop on Thursday and finish those Valentine's Day poems!!

** We need your help! This is an important reminder that out school is NUT FREE. This is especially important in our classroom because we have several severe nut allergies. Please help us stay safe. This does not just mean the actual nut. This means we cannot have items containing nuts including (but not limited to) granola bars, candy, nutella, trail mix etc. This is very serious and we cannot have children bringing these items to school. This is something we cannot do without your help! Please triple check lunch boxes in the morning to be sure they are nut free. I know lunches can be hard to pack but it is a major safety concern of ours. We usually do a walk through before snack and lunch but we cannot always catch everything, so that is why we are reaching out to parents for support on this as well. Thank you for your attention to this!

**Our school's birthday "treat" policy is that parents are asked to bring a healthy item only.

Thematic Centers:

This week we learned all about Michelangelo! He lived in Italy, he painted and sculpted and even worked on the Sistine Chapel. We rotated through 4 centers.

1. Illustrate and read the Michelangelo book.
2. Pain underneath the tables lying on your back like Michelangelo did when he worked on the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel.
3. Sketch a teacher.
4. Sculpt out of Ivory soap.

Math Workshop:

This week we reviewed counting by 5's and 10's all the way to 100. This is a great skill to practice with your child at home. We also learned about tally marks! We learned that once you get to 5 you make a diagonal slash across the 4 marks. This will come in handy when we are counting out 100's day collections next week! We worked on our range cards and continued to practice making our addition equations too.

Reader's Workshop:

We learned a new poem this week and glued it into our day books. We also learned a new site word this week: "and." We reviewed our old sight words: my, you, is, this, the, for & do and worked on our pencil grips.

Writer's Workshop:

This week we worked on editing one of our existing books. We used "boo boo tape" to correct misspelled site words, added more details and learned about the editing process and why it's important.

Have a great weekend,
Mrs. Schultz

January 11th-14th

Below are some pictures of the class during math tub time. Who knew math could be so fun??

Ms. Alicia was leading a small math group completing the January calendar. Writing numbers can be tricky. 

The crew that built this awesome castle out of blocks. 

Announcements:

1. Don't forget about your Valentine's Day poems! If you need help, send me an email.
2. Mrs. James and I are offering our Acrofitness class again this semester! There will even be a mini trampoline jumping opportunity at the end of every class this session. It will be on Tuesday from 3:15-4:15. We have had several people asking us if we were offering this again, so we decided to go for it. Sign up or send me an email and let me know if you want to join us. If your daughter is doing junior cheer on Tuesday and you would like to still join when junior cheer is over, there will be a discounted rate.
4. Art Gallery Crawl: February 18th at 11:00.
5. Mom/Baby pictures: Please send in a baby picture of you and your child for our next artist center.
6. Our valentine poem celebration will be on February 10th at 1:00. We invite all parents to come in and help us read our valentine poems!
7. 4. No school 1/15, 1/18 and 1/22

Thematic Centers:
We have had a great week! We are saving several art pieces here at school to keep for our gallery crawl next month. We started learning about a new artist this week. His name is Claude Monet. We rotated through 4 main centers:
1. Illustrate the Monet mini book
2. Make a waterlily out of a coffee filter and paint it using liquid water colors. Monet was famous for painting waterlilies outside!
3. Choose one of Monet's famous paintings and water color paint over top of it.
4. Choose a picture and color it using oil pastels and one of Monet's techniques. He used fine lines and then he would blend them together to make a beautiful picture. 

Reader's Workshop:

We learned a new site word this week: for. We also learned about capitalization and why this is important when writing and reading. We completed another page in our bare books and began to brainstorm our next page that will be about artists. 

Writer's Workshop:

We are still working on pencil grips each day and it is very hard! Ask your child to hold their pencil the correct way at home as well. They know how to do it, it is just hard to remember. This will help them as they grow and start to write for longer periods of time. We made several couplet poems as a class and some students chose to create couplets during writing this week all on their own! These are super fun. Hope everyone is enjoying working on these for Valentine's Day. 

Math Workshop:

We played a new game this week called "What's Missing?" The teacher calls out a sequence of numbers but leaves one number out of the sequence. Students have to figure out which number was left out. We went all the way up to 50! This was also printed out and placed in a math tub. 

Example: 4,5,6,__,8,9....The missing number would be 7!

We started something new this week called "Range Cards." This is where children work on coming up with different combinations to get to the same sum. Each child was assessed to figure out which number they needed to begin working on. We work with beans, unifix cubes and jewels to help us come up with different equations. 

Have a happy week and long weekend!
Mrs. Schultz

Welcome Back!

 Silly boys at recess!

Liam's big brother Jack, gave Liam a big hug on the field!

The girls were teaching us their polar express dance.

 Our first field trip to the nursing home.

Ella, Lily, Sophie and Allison wanted warm snuggles on a cold recess day! Can't say I blame them. ;)

William, Michael and Landon love to play soccer on the field with their friends. Check out Lauren as the goalie!

Tripp and Will wanted to take a "friendship" picture. How sweet!

Claire stops to tie Bryson's shoe. We love that she can help us tie!

The girls cheering for the soccer game on the field. 

Hello and welcome back!

There are lots of important announcements:

1. Our valentine poem celebration will be on February 10th at 1:00. We invite all parents to come in and help us read our valentine poems!
2. Please be sure you read the email I sent about the special way we do valentines here at CSD. Every child is responsible for writing couplet poems. If you need help with this or you have any questions email me. This is a really fun project, so enjoy!
3. Everyone needs to bring a picture of themselves with their  mommy as a baby! We are studying Mary Cassatt next (for our artist unit) and she was known for painting babies with their moms. Please bring this by next Thursday (1/14).
4. No school 1/15, 1/18 and 1/22
5. Our Art Gallery Crawl will be February 18th at 11:00. More details to come but mark your calendars!

Reader's Workshop:

We learned how to spell the word you this week as our new site word. We also worked on writing the letter Q, G and S in our handwriting without tears books.

Writer's Workshop:

This week we worked on organizing everyone's writing folders. We also focussed on proper pencil grip and starting our letters from the top!!

Math Workshop:

This week we reviewed all of our old games and started learning about the concept of addition. We talked about the "plus sign" and examined what an addition equation would look like! We also filled out a new January calendar to continue practice number writing.

Thematic Centers:

We started our new unit this week! Our artist unit is going to be a blast! The first artist we are studying is Kandinsky. He is known for his abstract art using shapes and lines. We rotated through 4 main centers:

1. Look through Kandinsky's artwork and create a water color imagine of your choice.
2. Look through Kandinsky's art and use a protractor, pattern block shapes and a ruler to create your own art in the style of Kandinsky.
3. Illustrate the Kandinsky book.
4. Use oil pastels to create circle art like Kandinsky's famous painting called :Farbstudie Quadrate 

Hugs,

Mrs. Schultz