What a fun filled week we had together! I have to say I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to be spending my days with your sweet children! I have so enjoyed getting to know each of them better, I really think I hit the jackpot with this great group of children. :) We were busy bees (or should I say ants) this week. We wrapped up our unit on Creepy Crawlies by learning about ants. We read several ant stories this week, and a class favorite seemed to be Two Bad Ants, by Chris Van Allsburg. This book is written from the perspective of an ant. It was so much fun trying to figure out where the ants were and what they were doing in this story. The children had to look carefully at the pictures and listen to the clues given in the book to make an inference about where the ants were exploring. We also read some non-fiction books about ants and talked about their life cycle. Each child recreated the life cycle of the ant and discussed the different stages it goes through. We read the book One Hundred Hungry Ants, and then did some estimating and counting on ten frames with some plastic ants in our classroom. We also created a scene that we thought an ant might enjoy, such as a picnic, and painted the ants in the scene using Q-tips and toothpicks. Finally, we made delicious ants on a log. Each child got a recipe to read and follow and then made their own yummy snack!
In math this week we made our own domino book, based on the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear. Each child had to match the dots in their book to the number they were given and then read their books. Have your child practice reading his/her book to you at home. We also used dominoes to begin talking and thinking about number bonds (fact families). We counted the dots on the dominoes to match them to a number written on the table. We made math pumpkin pies by adding whip cream (cotton balls) to match the number on our pie shape and then recorded it. This seemed to be one of their favorite centers. Finally, we began creating our math toolkits (journals). This is a place where the children will be recording and keeping important math work that we are doing. I will send these home periodically for you to take a look at and talk about with your child. We started our toolkits by talking about how numbers are written as numerals, written in words and how they can be represented by a picture. I look forward to seeing their progress as we add to these. A favorite class game this week was Monster Squeeze. One child thought of a "secret" number represented on the number line between zero and ten. We held one monster at zero and one at ten. The rest of the students tried to guess the secret number. Each time a guess was made the monsters would "squeeze" closer to the secret number by determining if the number guessed was higher or lower than the secret number until someone figured out the secret number.
We had lots of fun reading and writing this week. One of our favorites was Write the Room. We had turkeys with high frequency words on them hung all around the room. The students used a clip board, pencil and paper to go around and see if they could write down as many words as they could find. After they wrote down their words they practiced reading them. We also created a book about a turkey. In this book the turkey moves all over the place. He goes under, over, behind and beside many different objects. The students have to place the turkey according to where the positional words describe on the page. Lilliah was our Marvelous Me girl this week! We talked about how many vowels and consonants she has in her name. We also talked about why it is important to capitalize the first letter in someone's name when we write it...because they are special and important!
Did you hear that a turkey has been hiding in our classroom? Gobbles the turkey has been leaving us daily messages and "flying" to different spots in our classroom each day. We LOVE reading his messages each day and finding out what he has been up to. The children are really good at finding words and letters that they recognize in his message. Each day a different child gets to take home Gobbles letter to keep so that they can read it with their parents and talk about all the words and letters they know! :)
This week we were very excited to have our 2nd grade book buddies come and visit. We spent time reading with them and drawing a scene from our favorite part in the story. Book buddies was on our list of favorite things this week!
Our field trip to the Raptor Center on Wednesday was a huge success. We loved seeing the beautiful raptors and learning more about what they eat, how they hunt, how they fly and what they do at the Raptor Center. It was a wonderful way to celebrate our unit of study. A huge thanks to all of our volunteers this week who helped us both on the field trip and in the classroom. Mrs. Hazlett sent out a sign up genius for me for upcoming volunteer opportunities. If you did not receive this please let me know and we will make sure you get it. If for some reason none of the times I have listed work for you just let me know. You are welcome to volunteer anytime! We LOVE having extra hands in our classroom. Just send me an email and let me know when you would like to come in and we will set it up. The more the merrier! :)
When we return from Thanksgiving break we will be turning our housekeeping center into a gift wrapping station for some holiday fun! We will need several rolls of wrapping paper, several rolls of scotch tape, bows and some empty boxes of various sizes to make this happen. If you would be willing to send in any of these items please let me know, or just send them in. This will be a great way for students to work on fine motor skills all while they are having fun!
Our upcoming unit of study is one of my favorites. It is Traditions Around the World. If you have any special traditions that you celebrate in your family that you would like to share with our class please let me know. We would love for you to come in and share your wonderful family traditions with our class family.
Reminders:
-Don't forget to send in an extra set of clothes for your child.
-Please return your child's rest towel or blanket after you wash it.
-We would love to have gift wrapping supplies for our December gift wrapping station.
Upcoming Events:
November 14 - Love and Logic Parenting Session 8:30 am
November 16 - Love and Logic Parenting Session 7:00 pm
November 22-24 Thanksgiving Holiday - No School
November 24 - High School Football Game Round 3 of the State Playoffs
November 28 - Love and Logic Parenting Session 8:30 am
December 5 - Love and Logic Parenting Session 8:30 am
December 12 - Field Trip to the Laurels 10:00 am
December 19 - Making Gingerbread Houses 1:00
December 20-January 2 - Winter Break - No School
