2 Week Update!

Science Fun! Making elephant toothpaste for Sci Fri with Ms. Morgan.

Our visit from Mr. Ted is below. He was phenomenal! Read below find our more info. 

Sweet Liam, enjoying his moment of sharing his writing.

Hello families!

I just realized that I have not posted a blog in the last couple of weeks. Can you tell life has been crazy lately? So sorry about that! I started writing one last week and realized it never posted. So last week's and this week's will be combined. :)  Hopefully I will be more on top of that for the rest of the month! It was soooo good to see many of you at the CSD festival on Tuesday. Hope you had fun!

Thematic Centers:

Because of our crazy short two weeks, we finished Rapunzel centers Tuesday and started studying Cinderella today! We will rotate through 4 Cinderella centers and read several versions of Cinderella.

1. Make and decorate an invitation to the fairy tale ball (Next Friday 9-11 in the elementary gym). Be sure you get the time, location and date correct!
2. Turn a real mini pumpkin into Cinderella's carriage using jewels, sequins, paint, pom poms etc.
3. Record the beginning, middle and end of the story by illustrating and writing a sentence using your tri-fold story board. You may use water colors, colored pencils, markers or crayons.
4. Using attribute blocks, trace different shapes to make a castle. After tracing your shape castle, you may paint it or color it in. Count how many shapes you have and record how many of each you used. Discuss 2-D and 3-D shapes among your table as well as the different attributes that each shape possess.

We also rotated through 4 Rapunzel centers:

1. Using a stencil, trace and paint Rapunzel's tower. Place Rapunzel at the top and learn to braid her long hair.
2. Roll bread dough into a snake and then braid it to look  like Rapunzel's hair. Sprinkle with gold sprinkles. Bake and write down the recipe to take home.
3. Make a play dough braid out of yellow play dough. Measure the braid with pennies, paper clips, legos and unifix cubes. We use non standard measurement in first grade so this is practicing that skill. This also worked on fine motor skills.
4. Using various materials from the mystery bin, create an escape route for Rapunzel to travel down to escape from the witch and find her prince! Share your escape route with the class. This was certainly a favorite and everyone was so creative!

Math Workshop:

We are still working on those story problems and you can definitely help us by practicing these at home too! We also learned 2 new math games and filled out October calendars.

1. Subtraction Slide: Roll 2 number cubes. Add them together. Subtract 20 from that number. Find that number and slide it onto your color. The first player to cover all of their colored circles up, wins. This requires extra thinking.

2. One more, one less: Player 1 covers up two numbers on the hundreds chart with pennies. Player two only sees the number in the middle and has to say which number comes right before and right after that number. Example. Cover up 15 and 17 so that 16 is revealed. The player who did not do the covering must say that 15  is one less than 16 and 17 is one more than 16.

Science:

Ms. Morgan came again last week to do another experiment. We made elephant toothpaste! Ask your child what ingredients were in it and what happened.

** A side note...your kiddos are now super into rocks and gems after exploring the geodes in science with Ms. Leslie a few weeks ago. They have been wanting to hammer all kinds of rocks that they find at school. Learning is so fun.

Writer's Workshop:

Last week we worked on labeling and the different reasons you might want to label in your writing. This week we studied poetry and it was perfect because we had a guest speaker come and talk to us about it! Will's cousin Ted Scheu, came to get us excited about writing poetry. He was amazing and now everyone has been writing poems! Check out his website: http://www.poetryguy.com/ He speaks at all kinds of schools and we were honored that he came to visit us. He even gave us two of his poetry books and his CD,

Reader's Workshop:

We are still working on sight words, new word study words and reading each week. We learned "flippy dolphin" which tells us to flip the vowel and try it a different way!

So far we have learned Flippy Dolphin, Stretchy Snake and Eagle Eye. Remind your child to use these strategies at home when they come across a tricky word while reading.

**We still need toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls for castle building next week! Please send them in! We also need you to save cream/half and half cartons for December. We need you to save the quart size cartons. Sometimes juice and milk come in these too. Save them all please!** This is the size we need. Of course, it does not have to be this exact carton, this is just for size reference.

The fairy tale ball is NEXT FRIDAY! Can you believe it is already time for that? Please let me know if you need any help with costumes. Please be in the elementary gym by 9 am sharp. You won't want to miss the precious dance at the beginning of the ball. The ball will go until 11. We will rotate through 8 stations. We will also need someone to come and spray paint paper towel tubes/toilet paper rolls next week. We will use these to build castles at one of the stations. We would love it if you are able to stay the whole time (9-11) but completely understand if you cannot due to work or other arrangements,

**Leveled books: This week we got completely off track with leveled readers. Between last week's short week and this one, we got off a bit. Some kids will get books today. Just read them over the weekend and return Monday. Thanks for being flexible!

**Sight words: Everyone is doing amazing with their sight word cards! Some kiddos have already learned all of their words already. I cannot thank you enough for your help with this! Remember to keep it fun. Write your words in the bath tub with bath tub crayons, write them with chalk, roll letters to make words out of play dough, write them in the sand etc. If you need more ideas of how to make it fun, I have lots of resources!

Have a great weekend! Sorry again about all the confusion with the blog the past couple of weeks.
Emily Schultz