October 17-21

Welcome to another busy week! My husband and I moved over the weekend, so I feel like the weekend just flew by. Although I have been back from Germany for over a year, my husband was still working there last year school year, so this past summer was our official relocation back to the US as a couple. Our container with all of our belongings, including our car, was delivered on Friday, so we have spent quite a bit of time unpacking, sorting, making piles of things to give away, and settling into our new place. Because of the relocation, we were in a temporary furnished apartment until our stuff arrived and now we are in our new place. Whew....busy busy!

I am going to start with the important reminders so they don't get lost at the end of this post.

1. Next week is our field trip to the Pumpkin Patch on Tuesday the 25th. If you are coming with us, you will most likely be in charge of your child plus one additional child from the class. If you come along you must take your child home from the Pumpkin Patch unless you need to return to work. Any children who do not go home from the Pumpkin Patch can be picked up at school at 1:00 or can ride the bus home at 2:25 if needed. All students need to arrive at school by 8:15 AM and we will leave at 9:00 AM. Please make sure your child brings a sack lunch that can be tossed away. Please don't send items that need to be returned home like water bottles or plastic food containers. Things like these are hard to keep track of and we don't want items getting lost. Also, I recommend making sure your child's name is in his/her jacket or sweatshirt, so these items don't get lost as well.

2. We will also be having parent teacher conferences next week. I will have a substitute in the classroom on Wednesday so that I can do conferences during the school day and I will also be holding conferences all day on Thursday and Friday. There is no school on Thursday and Friday for the children. I encourage you to bring your child to the conference if you can. Please return the orange conference reminder sheet I sent home ASAP to either confirm that you can come at the scheduled time or that you need me to help you reschedule. I need time to make arrangements for parents who are not able to make the scheduled times.

3. I need some help with filing math papers. If anyone is interested in taking home the box and filing math sheets from our workbooks, I would greatly appreciate it!

Reading

This week we will be covering the sounds /c/ and /k/ in our letter lessons. We completed the first ten lessons, so I spent some time last week assessing children to check in and see how well they are remembering the letter-sound relationships. I will share this information with you at conferences. We are also focusing on the letter P all week. Our country of the week is Papa New Guinea. Have you ever visited there? Our sight words this week are "am" and "a." We will be doing various activities and projects this week to reinforce the letter of the week and our two sight words.

Math

This week in math we are going to focus on the concepts of same and different. This will involve looking at three images and circling the one that is different and also using graphing mats to compare two numbers that are different in order to tell which has more tiles and which has fewer. We are continuing to practice putting the number tiles in order from 1-10 and quickly recognizing numbers in order to show that many fingers.

Science

Today we talked about different tools we use to observe and measure. We discussed a picture and talked about magnifying glasses, rulers, measuring cups, thermometers, and scales. Our science lessons are short and mean to draw from what students know in order to think about science and what scientists do.