January 29th-February 1st

News & Reminders:

• We will be starting our Teddy Bear Project soon! Each student will get to sew his/her very own Teddy Bear. If you would like to send in special buttons to be the eyes on your child's bear, please do so by Wednesday February 6th.
• I already have a few parents who volunteer weekly, but I will need some additional help for the Teddy Bear project. If you are interested in helping please let me know! 
• We will have a Valentine's Day party on Thursday the 14th. I am sending info home about Valentine cards tomorrow in the Friday folders. 
• Report Cards are being sent home tomorrow.

Reading & Writing

Our letter of the week this week is R and our word of the week is for. 

This week we started a new unit on Animals which started with a story called Mama Cat and her Three Kittens. The vocabulary words for our story were compare and actions. We read the big book story that told about what the mama cat and her three kittens did, then we did a silent picture walk to remember all of the actions the cats did. After that, the kiddos talked with their partner to see how many actions they could remember from the story. Finally, they did some writing and completed the sentence "Cats can ____."

I introduced a new app this week called Skitch. We use this app to label pictures/photos in order to practice sounding out and spelling words. I will periodically email you examples of your child's work using this app so you can see the development in his/her spelling.

We have completed our Fast Track Phonics units, so we are now moving on to reinforce some word work skills. We are using various apps to practice spelling words and changing sounds to create new words.

Math
We are continuing to work with 5-groups, but this week we used pennies and 5-groups of pennies instead of the square inch tiles that we typically use. Today the class built the numbers 1-10 using 5-groups and extra pennies. Soon we will be moving on to teen numbers which helps to build the foundation for place value. All of the repetition in math is intended to build number sense and automaticity with basic math facts.