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What a busy group we were this week. Read all about our exciting learning adventures below! 

Literacy

This week, the children continued to work with short /a/ words. We read books about weather. The children worked on sequence of events, retelling stories including key details and asking questions. The children begin creating a RAN graphic organizer, which will help us organize our ideas about weather. We will categorize the information that we know and learn about weather over the next few weeks. This week we added sticky notes for What We Think We Know and Wonderings. We will continue to add to our organizer during Reading and Science time for the next couple weeks. 

Grammar Packets:

The children continued to work with sentence structure in our grammar packets this week. They payed close attention to beginning capitals and periods at the end of sentences. They are becoming experts at recognizing complete and incomplete sentences.  

Writing

This week, the children celebrated all of their hard work by meeting with students from Mrs. Glaser and Miss Bander’s classes. In groups of three, the children took turns reading their autobiographies. They had a great time sharing their writing. Enjoy the slide show of our writing celebration below! 

                                         

This week, we started our second writing unit. The children will work on Narrative writing, zooming in on a small moment in their lives to write about. To start, they chose something that they did over the weekend and used lots of detail to describe the event. 

Next week, the children will begin the process of writing their very own small moment story. You can help your child at home by talking about an event in their life that was really exciting for them: a trip, a big game, a birthday. Help them recall their favorite event in lots of detail, they will use this to write their narrative.

Math 

In Math, the children used their clocks to show times to the hour and used approximations to say what time their clocks read, for example, just after 7, a little before 11, in between 1 and 2. The children enjoyed explorations in math. They rotated through three stations: domino sorting ( learning that the dot patterns on dominos represent numbers), straight line dot to dot (using rulers), and estimating relative lengths of objects (sorting objects into two groups, smaller and larger than a six inch ruler).  

On Wednesday and Thursday, the children explored pennies and nickels. They identified the characteristics of each coin and learned how to write their values. They enjoyed learning two poems:

                                                 

Penny

Penny, penny 

Easily spent

Copper brown

And worth one cent!

Nickel

Nickel, nickel

Thick and fat

You’re worth five cents

I know that!

The children named values of different groups of pennies. They also counted groups of nickels and pennies and recorded the values in cent notation. The children worked with exchanging pennies for nickels. 

Science

This week, we began our first science unit. The children learned all about what a scientist does. We read the book, What Is a Scientist and worked together to create a chart listing everything that a scientist does. Then, the children created their own super scientist. Inside the lab jacket they wrote about what a scientist does. 

Later in the week, we started our unit on Weather. The scientists defined weather as, how the sky looks and feels. They learned that the main parts of weather are: temperate, sunlight, wind, clouds, and moisture.

The scientists learned about meteorologists. A meteorologist is a person who studies weather. The scientists researched about meteorologists using pebblego.com and by watching a weather report. The scientists became meteorologists themselves and took turns reporting the weather. 

The scientists worked with thermometers to measure temperature. They measured the temperature of their hands, the air, and water. They discussed what they noticed about the thermometers and the different temperature readings. They recorded the temperatures using the thermometer color scale. 

Star Student

Henry was our star student this week. Thanks Henry for sharing all about you!

Royal Reader

Thank you to Henry’s Dad, he joined us this week as our Royal Reader. The children enjoyed listening to two wonderful books, Yellowbelly and Plum Go to School and Boogie Knights.

Notes:

• The children had a wonderful time participating in the Dryden Just Jump Challenge. Each child was very excited to receive a jump rope to bring home. Thank you to Mr. Gries and everyone on the PTA for making this event possible! 
• Wednesday, is Walk To School Day. All the teachers will be out at 8:40am to walk to school with the children. I hope to see you on your way to school! 
• There is no school on Monday, October 14th because of Columbus Day or Tuesday, October 15th because of a SIP Day.

Have a great rest of the weekend!