Reminders/News
Hopefully you all received the info about our Gingerbread House Decorating party which will take place on Friday December 21st starting at 9:30. Please send in the item you were assigned to by December 14th. If you are in charge of icing, please send that in the day of the party (in the morning so it can be portioned out and ready when the party starts). If you are unable to provide the item you were assigned please let me know asap.
Family Tradition collages are due Monday December 10th.
Scholastic Book Club orders were due today. If you'd like to order and have not done so already please have your order submitted online by the end of the day today. I will submit it tomorrow.
We welcomed a new student to our class today. His name is Reimundo. And sadly, our friend Xander and his family moved to Germany so last Thursday was his last day with us.
This week in class....
Reading/Writing
We are finishing up our second Fast Track unit which means I will be assessing the students at the end of the week to check in on their progress. We will be covering the /ng/ sound this week and that can be a tricky one, so I will spend more time on that sound than I do with other letter sounds.
We are starting a 3 week study of transportation. Today we read a big book story called The Bus For Us. While listening to the story students made predictions using the clues in the illustrations and then when the story was over they talked with their partners to see how many different vehicles from the story they could recall and what those different vehicles do. Our vocabulary words this week are transportation and vehicle. The new Common Core State Standards that Oregon has adopted place a lot of emphasis on reading non-fiction texts and responding to questions that require students to use information found in the text. We are also starting a unit on informational/non-fiction writing which will be informed by the information we learn in the stories we read. Students will still be writing in a narrative style for "Weekend News" on Monday mornings, but they will also be learning how to write in a way that explains or gives information about our topic of study. Later this week they will use the sentence frame A ______ is a vehicle to write about one of the vehicles in the story. The goal is for them to write a topic sentence and then provide two details.
Math
We are focusing on five groups and seeing five groups in the numbers 6-10. We have been practicing some different hand games to get students comfortable and fluent with recognizing the five group and extras in those numbers. Student will also be using their math trays and number tiles as well as a new app called Doodle Buddy to demonstrate how to visually show the numbers 6-10 as a group of five and then extras. Using five groups is a great segue into seeing that quantities can be grouped in different ways and that builds foundational knowledge for addition.
We also started using math stories today. Following my model, students were asked to use some props (napkins, spoons, cups, and "marshmallows" (pom poms)) to tell a math story having to do with eating dinner or having a snack or drinking cocoa. One student in each group told the math story and the other students had to write the equation that goes along with that story on their whiteboard app. We will revisit the concept of math stories throughout the year so that the kids can see that we use math in our everyday lives and practice writing equations based on those stories.
Science
We don't have a lot of time for Science but we have begun talking about tools we use for observation in Science and I have introduced a few hands on science/observation activities during choice time. They were very popular and the kiddos had fun examining objects with magnifying glasses.
