April 29th-May 3rd

Wow! 

I can't believe it's almost May already. 

Soon enough the kiddos will be leaving me to become big First Graders! 

Reminders

• Scholastic Book orders are due next Monday. This will be the last book order of the school year. 
• Spring photos are Thursday May 2nd. Only students who have an order form and payment will have their photos taken. If you are sending an order form with you child, please send me an email to let me know. That way I know to ask for it/check his/her backpack.

Reading/Writing
This week we are finishing up our unit on Plants. Our story this week is called Sunflower house and we will focus on the vocabulary words senses and garden. Our letter of the week is J and our word of the week is with. On Tuesday the kiddos will learn the /ay/ sound. Later in the week we will start working on a super secret writing project that will be revealed next week ;0)

Math
On Wednesday the kiddos will get to do some graphing and adding with jelly beans for some J week fun. We will continue practicing teen numbers by building ten-groups and extras with stamps. The kiddos will also fill in a blank 100 chart to see how many numbers they know between 1 and 100.

Science
It's that time of year...we have butterflies in our room! Well--not quite yet...we have caterpillars! This is one of the most exciting activities we do all year because the kids get to watch the caterpillars change into butterflies with their very own eyes. We will be documenting the changes by photographing our caterpillars with the Ipads. We've also started using a new app called Book Creator to make a book all about Butterflies. I am amazed at how quickly the kiddos learned how to add text, photos, and sound to their books. They are working on writing scientific descriptions of what they see and how the caterpillars are changing. We have also practiced using QR codes and the scan app to access beautiful photos of butterflies from the internet. QR codes are used to ensure that kids are accessing appropriate photos on the internet rather than running the risk they will encounter something they shouldn't see.

April 22nd-26th

Reading

Students are continuing to learn "first grade sounds" during phonics instruction. Because these sounds are more challenging, I introduce one new sound each week rather than several. This helps give a little more time for it to sink in.

Sound we have covered recently
/oo/ zoom to the moon
/ar/ start the car
/c/ city mice on ice (soft c)

This week our sound is
/ou/ shout it out

Our letter of the week is X and our word of the week is look.

This week we are continuing our reading unit on plants. We are in the second week of this unit and the focus this week is on Seeds and Plants. Last week we focused on How Trees Grow. Today our story talked about many different ways seeds can move from place to place such as getting carried by birds, blowing in the wind, or being carried by water. Later this week, the kiddos will get the chance to dissect a seed and see what it looks like inside.

Writing

Our current writing focus in Opinion writing. In this type of writing, the kiddos are expected to state their opinion relating to a particular topic or prompt and then give reasons to explain their opinion. When I was absent last Friday they wrote a piece in response to the question "Do you like to eat vegetables? Why or why not? As they are becoming more and more proficient in writing, spelling is becoming more accurate and we are now working on making sure to put periods at the end of each sentence and to capitalize the first letter of each new sentence. Writing is looking great!

Math

This week we are focusing on measurement. Today we looked at several different tools used to measure (measuring cups/spoons, a ruler, and two different kinds of measuring tape). We talked about how we use particular tools based on what we need to measure. One example I gave was that if I wanted to measure chocolate chips to add to my cookie recipe, I couldn't use a ruler for that. Throughout the week the kiddos will be doing some hands on measuring during math time and we will be using the math vocabulary words long/longer/longest, short/shorter/shortest, tall/taller/tallest.

March 11th-15th

Reminders/Upcoming Events

Starting March 18th Durham will be collecting food for the food backpack program. Ramen noodles, rice, beans, cereal, and cans of corn or green beans will be collected until March 22nd. We appreciate your donations!!

Next Friday will be our Teddy Bear parade. The kiddos have been working hard on their bears and they are ready to show them off! Our parade will begin at 9:30 and we will parade into other classrooms. After the parade I would love to have a special Bear Parade snack and serve some Teddy Grahams. If you would like to contribute a box of Teddy Grahams, please let me know. 

Spring conferences are this Friday! Your child is looking forward to showing off all that he/she has learned this year! Students will be using their iPads to show you some work during the conference and I am requesting that older/younger siblings not touch the iPads. Thanks for your help in honoring our Kinders and all their hard work.

Reading/Writing
Yesterday students completed the writing post assessment for informative writing. Their task was to write about why it is important to read. Informative writing can be quite challenging for students who are still focusing on learning the mechanics of writing and mastering sounds, but they did a great job.

We have been focusing a lot on writing in the past few weeks including some writing jobs about all of the wonderful Mo Willems books we have been reading. I introduced the kiddos to Knuffle Bunny last week during K week and they were big fans. Mo Willems also write stories about Pigeon as well as Gerald & Piggy. We use Socrative to vote for our favorite stories and characters and then analyzed the graph that was created based on our votes. The kiddos also wrote about which story was their favorite and why.

Next week we will begin a unit on weather and the kiddos will do some writing about weather.

Math
We are continuing to practice teen numbers in math. You will get to see how we use our iPad to practice showing ten groups and ones at your conference.

February 11th-15th

Reading & Writing
Students are continuing to work on narrative writing in their journals. Each Monday they write about one thing they did over the weekend. I ask them to include two details and a feeling about what they did. This week we talked about trying out some different words/feelings other than "good" and "fun."

They have also started working on their bear books where they will write about the process of sewing their Teddy Bear.

Our reading theme this week was animals and we read a story called Mole and the Baby Bird. Our new vocabulary words this week were habitat and responsibility. In the story, the mole came across a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Mole took the bird home to be his pet and put it in cage. Even though Mole was trying hard to take care of the bird, the bird wasn't happy because it couldn't fly. At the end of the story, Mole realized that the bird needed to be able to fly and wasn't able to do that if he was in a cage, so he let the bird go. At first Mole was sad, but then he was happy when he saw how happy the bird was to be free. After reading the story, students talked to their partners about whether or not they thought Mole was responsible to let the bird go.

This week we tried out a new app called Socrative with the help of Mr. Engstrom who works for the district and is available to help me co-teach when we use iPads. Socrative requires students to log into my "classroom" where they can take a quiz that I have prepared. I used this app to administer a quiz to practice spelling words. The great thing about the app is that I receive the student data via email so that I can track how students are doing and what sounds may need more practice.

We also tried out a new app called Scan that uses QR codes, but due to Internet issues, we had some trouble.

Our letter of the week this week was B and our word of the week was what.

Math
A letter was sent home in the Friday folders today that talks about what we are currently working on in math. We have begin unit 3 and are focusing on teen numbers. Students should recognize that when we write teen numbers they all start with a 1. They should also recognize that teen numbers have a group of ten and extra ones. I posted a Teen Number video prior to this post that you can watch. I add a second verse to the song that goes, Come on everybody let's sing it again, numbers in the teens have a group of 10! We've used the Doodle Buddy app as well as some hand motions to practice 11-13 so far.

We also practiced sorting candy hearts by color and graphing how many of each color students had.

Bears
Looking forward to having Amanda, Grammy Deb, Lindsay, and Stephanie next week for help with our Teddy Bears!

Teen Numbers

Super e

February 4th-8th

Reminders/Announcements:

• 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.