- If you are interested in ordering from the February Scholastic Book Club flyers, please submit your order either online or on the paper order form by Monday the 11th.
- We have officially started sewing Teddy Bears and the kids are so excited! We are a bit behind, so next week the kids will finish sewing on a heart and two buttons for eyes, and then they will sew their bear from ear to ear.
- On Thursday, we will have a Valentine Party beginning at 10:00 AM. If your child is doing Valentine cards remember to have them complete a few at a time instead of the whole class at once. That's a lot of writing! Use the list I sent home and include students' numbers on the cards please.
- We are now starting our second round of Star/Co-Star of the Week. If your child was the Star the first time around, he/she will now be the Co-Star and vice versa. Students will still have a chance to do a show and tell, but a family project is replacing the family photo this time around.
Reading/Writing
This week our letter of the week was E and our word of the week was this. The class was very excited that they are now able to listen to our sight word songs in iTunes on their iPads. We had to practice not singing out loud and dancing around while listening, but they are really enjoying the opportunity to listen to music. The sight word songs are a fantastic way to help them remember how to spell the sight words, which I do expect them to spell correctly in their writing. There are also some Learning with Hip Hop songs on there which I can already tell are going to be favorites.
We started using an app called Popplet this week, which is an app that I am also using for organizing my dissertation data. It's a mind-mapping tool that allows the kids to create webs and organize information visually. We made a Mrs. Toppel Popplet where my name was in the center and they wrote (typed) different things they know about me in the bubbles, which are called Popples, around my name. They also made a Popplet about either pets or zoo animals yesterday when Mrs. Emerson was subbing. They used information from the Baby Animals ABC book we read this week to categorize animals as either pets or zoo animals, then used their category at the center of the popple and the names of the animals in that group around category Popple. Once the kiddos have had a little more practice with the app, I will have them email their work to me so I can forward it to you.
We are continuing with the theme of animals and learned about many different baby animals with our big book story this week--one animal for every letter of the alphabet! During big book read alouds, I always ask students to talk to their partners in order to have them recall information they learned, make predictions, and have a chance to interact rather than just sitting and listening. Kids love to talk, so I like to respect that and provide them with opportunities to share their ideas during my lessons. The vocabulary words this week were information and parents.
Math
This week we finished up our second unit in math, which focused on 5-groups. I gave the end of unit assessment today and the kids did great. The objectives of the unit were to write numerals 1-10, see and make numbers in 5-groups, and identify and continue a pattern. We also worked a lot on practicing the names of the basic shapes (circle, oval, square, rectangle, triangle) as well as hexagon and trapezoid. Starting Monday, the students will be at tables that are now marked by different shapes. From now on when I call table groups, I will use the name of the shape that is on the tables to help reinforce the shape names.
Next week we start Unit 3 in our math program, which focuses on teen numbers 11-19. These numbers can be tricky for students, so I have a few fun ideas planned to get them interested and excited about teen numbers. The goals of Unit 3 are for students to find partners of numbers through 6, see teen numbers as tens and ones, and to use = and ≠ to pose and solve addition and subtraction problems.
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