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