Friday Fun Facts...

Happy Friday!  It has been pretty hit or miss these day for our outside recess time!  We have definitely made the best of the situation with our indoor recess games.  We got a lot of use out of our Makerspace tubs.  Check out some of the fun projects that kids worked on:

This week we continued to work in our social studies unit on Neighborhoods.  We have had a lot of great discussions about what types of buildings and places you can find in a neighborhood.

During our OG time, we are learning about the sounds -ank, -ink, -unk, and -onk.  We are about 3/4's of the way through our sight word list so keep practicing them at home. Our next big focus has been writing a sentence that is dictated to the class.  Each child tries to write a sentence daily with me and we are looking for our sight words to be spelled correctly, capital letters and punctuation, and we are looking for the chidlren to practice using the spelling patterns of words that we are learning during the week.  This is a great time of day when we try to be fluent writers and get a product on the page quickly. 

Our focus this week in writing has been creating a "preview page" for our how-to stories.  We have looked at several how-to books to see what information they included on their preview page.  We talked about how it gives a brief insight into their story.  We have also been sharing the children's how-to stories to help spark new ideas and to help make sure all of the steps have been included in their writing.

 I hope to get the leadership binders back to you next week as well.  I have sent off some new pages to be copied and I am waiting for them to be delivered before giving them back to you.  Mrs. Rohan will also be trading out the take home books, so please make sure those are in your child's backpack next week as well.

We wrapped up our unit on penguins this week and we are going to learn about the groundhog since Groundhog's day is coming up next week.  I hope you have a great weekend!

Welcome back to a new year!  We have settled in and have enjoyed a nice three day weekend!  We are definitely off and running with our new semester.  It is hard to believe, but this week is our 100th week of school.  The official day is this Thursday.  We have a lot of fun activities planned for the week.  We are going to be making books with 100 words, filling out a 100 number chart, making predictions and then actually counting to see where 100 steps will get us, drawing our selves at 100, and many more fun activities!

During social studies, we are learning about "What is in my neighborhood?"  We have had a lot of great discussion to describe the many different buildings, sights, and places you might find in a neighborhood.  We have had a lot of great moments when the kids realize that their neighborhood doesn't have the same things as some of the other children in our classroom.

We have kicked off a new writing unit in class.  We are learning to write "how-to" stories.  These are stories that teach a reader something.  We have learned that these types of stories are "bossy", they have steps, the steps are labeled, and there is picture for each step.  Some popular stories have been how to make a pbj sandwich, how to ride a bike, and how to build with Legos.

During some of our writing time we have also been writing about winter.  Even though we don't seem to have a lot of snow these days, it has been fun writing about snowmen and all things winter.  Next week, we will be working the topic of penguins.  We are doing some work with being able to tell fiction stories apart from non-fiction stories.  We will continue to work on this topic next week in class. 

Finally, during our OG time we have been working on the -ng sound.  These are words with -ang, -ing, -ong, and -ung at the end.  It has been great to really challenge the children to come up with words that would have these ending sounds.  We have also started to work really hard at sentence dictation.  This is embedded in our OG time and it is meant to practice all of the skills that we have learned up to this point.  We practice sight words, finger spelling unknown words, and practice writing a complete sentence.  We use what we call our COPS rules.  This is where we look at the sentence when finished and make sure there are capitals, punctuation, word wall words, and spelling in the correct spots.  When we do find an error, we give that error a "ticket" and everyone has a goal of zero tickets on their sentence each day.  I have told the kids this is why the list of sight words is so important to learn because it helps when writing words down quickly.

This Friday will be a binder check in day.  Please have all binders turned in to me so I can update them and check in on the goals.  Thanks!

Have a great week!